


It Was The Best of Times

by Happy9450



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2016-12-02
Packaged: 2018-03-07 22:19:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 29
Words: 137,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3185300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Happy9450/pseuds/Happy9450
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Regrets, revelations and recommitment to the future in the aftermath of Charlie Skinner's death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Adjustments

“I'm seven weeks pregnant, and there’s like a five in nine chance that it's yours.” 

Every cell in MacKenzie McHale McAvoy’s body froze as she heard her voice. Had she just said that? Had she . . . Oh, sweet Mary, Mother of God . . . had she actually just joked with Will about cheating on him? About infidelity . . . no, about adultery? Put into his head the idea that she had slept with somebody while he was in prison? Did she have a death wish, jumping in with both feet onto a land mine that had nearly killed her the last time it blew?

She was so high on Catherine’s news, she realized, that she was reckless, positively giddy with relief and joy. Will’s face in the church had been all that she'd hoped for. She knew that the days ahead would be filled with stress and struggle and intense moments of pure grief, however, what she had felt most strongly during the prayers was not sorrow, but peace. She had felt that from beyond death, Charlie Skinner was sharing the incredible gift she was able to give Will. It was as if Charlie had been standing there next to her, beaming at Will, grinning from ear to ear as he watched it sink in for his boy . . . “our boy” . . . that he was going to be somebody’s father . . . was . . . somebody’s father, a microscopic somebody, but a living being just the same. Will was happy about the baby and she was drunk on promise and future, and like any drunk, she'd . . . Please, God, don't let me have screwed this up.

Christ! Will is talking to me, she thought suddenly. She tried to bring herself back to reality. It’s okay. It's okay. He doesn't look angry. What’s he saying?

“. . . Couple of questions.”

“Give them to me.”

 

Despite playing the straight man in their Nick and Nora (or was it George and Gracie, he couldn't decide) comedy routine outside the church, and despite time out for a show whose preliminary numbers indicated that it would eclipse the Genoa report as the the most watched program in the history of cable news, followed by some very intense celebratory sex, by mid-night, Will was as close to being an expert on pregnancy as one could become from the websites of the Mayo and Cleveland Clinics, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and those of half a dozen medical schools. Mac, still wired and awake, was having a “life's too short to worry about work evening” and was reading a novel, which Will kept interrupting with various bits of pregnancy-related data that he found interesting. She imagined that this was what doctors’ wives experience. Not that she wasn't grateful for his interest or his prodigious brain power. It was just that if he kept hovering like this, it was going to be a long seven months. At least now, she told herself, it was intelligent hovering, and undeniably, he was and would be the source of valuable information that she could use to enhance her pregnancy and the baby’s chances of a healthy, easy birth (easy, she mused, was a strange word to apply to the act of pushing a fully formed human being out of your body).

Shortly after mid-night, Will closed the laptop, and walked to the overstuffed chair in which his wife sat, and taking her hand and pulling her up into his embrace, whispered, “Let's go to sleep.” Then he looked into her eyes for a long time, and said, “you knew before today that you were pregnant.” It wasn't so much a question, as a prediction.

“Yes. I took three home tests a few weeks after my period failed to show up. They were all positive.”

His next question was not what she was expecting. “Did Charlie know?” Will asked.

"Yes,” she relied honestly, surprise and a little apprehension visible on her face.

A smile broke out on Will’s. “Thank God,” he said, using almost the exact intonation with which he'd greeted MacKenzie’s acceptance of his marriage proposal. Then, his face crumbled and grief and loss overwhelmed him. “Thank God,” he repeated tearfully, as his knees gave way and he slid down his wife's body. “I . . . I can't . . . be a father . . . I don't want to do this without him.” 

“I know.” For a long time after that, MacKenzie said nothing. She just held her husband against her and let him cry. He was so tired, she thought. She knew he was up half the night prowling around because after two months subjected to the constant noise of the jail block, the quiet of the apartment interfered with his ability to sleep. It was getting better, but had a way to go before things would be back to normal. Finally, when the worst of his mourning had passed, she whispered, “l believe you invited me to get some sleep.” Silently he rose and they walked into their bedroom.

The next morning, Will lay quietly for a long time watching MacKenzie sleep. The simple act of being able to observe her in repose had been one of the things he'd missed most during his days locked in a cell. Shit, he thought, he'd missed everything about her most during their time apart. But he'd had plenty of opportunity to watch her in the four mornings since he'd been home. She slept later now, which he now knew was common during the first trimester. She looked so beautiful and healthy lying there. She had been telling him the truth when she'd said that she was taking care of herself while he was away. She'd been taking care of his baby. That was why she hadn't lost weight. Had it been a comfort to her, knowing about the baby? Or had it made her feel more alone? He'd have lost his mind in there, if he had known.

Suddenly, he realized that her eyes were open, watching him. For how long, he wondered. “Hey, there.” He curled down and kissed her lips. “Good morning, Sleeping Beauty.”

"Good morning, my prince."

“When you were a little girl, did you dream of marrying a prince?”

“No,” she replied in a matter of fact tone, “all the ones I knew were either too old or too young.” 

"I was joking."

“Oh.”

He kissed her. "You were right not to tell me about the baby . . . while I was locked up, I mean. I'm not sure I could have stayed in. I'm not sure I wouldn't have given up, caved, and answered Lasenthal’s fucking questions, especially after Lily killed herself.”

“You only found out about Lily the morning of the day you were released.”

“Yeah . . . but I didn't know that at the time. I thought when I refused to answer his questions . . . divulge Lily’s identity . . . that I was going back in for God knows how long. What I'm trying to say is . . . as my EP, you made the right call. I think if I had been told that you were pregnant and knowing that there was only one way to get to you . . . What I'm saying is that I'm afraid that it would have been a test my integrity wouldn't have passed.”

Mac reached up to cup the sides of his face with her hands. “I think it would have, Billy. It would have been hard, but you would have stayed the course. And keeping you on the straight and narrow. . . that's not the reason that I didn't tell you.” When he looked skeptically at her, she amended, “well, not the primary reason, not even close.”

“Yeah? What was the primary reason?”

“I hated the idea of doing it in that awful visitors’ room. I couldn't stand the fact that I wouldn't be able to touch you, and that you'd be led away from me . . . after . . . . “ Will just stared at her wondering how after all he had done to her, he could possibly deserve this life. “What?” She asked. But he just shook his head and gestured for her to continue. “I had this whole fantasy of how you would look when I told you, how you’d kiss me and hold me . . . how you’d make love to me to celebrate . . . .”

“Laying it on me in a church kind of put the kibosh on that fantasy.”

“Not the part about your face. Your face was perfect.” She chuckled and kissed him on the lips. “And, well, as I recall, the church setting just delayed the rest of the fantasy for a little while.”

"So, here we are in Memphis,” Will said, wrapping his arms more tightly around his wife.

“Here we are in Memphis. Are you going to try to see Beau this week?”

“Yeah.”

“Don't forget about the little one . . . Ned. His suffering won't be as apparent, but it's just as real as Beau’s.” 

Will nodded. She was going to be one fantastic mother.

“And, Reese,” Mac continued. “I don't know if you noticed, but he sat alone in the back of the church, and then Sophie and he sort of fled the wake. I don't think either of them can handle Charlie’s death.” She turned to Will. “Reach out to Reese. You’re not the only one who lost a father that night.”

"There's no age at which it’s okay for your father to die.”

“What?”

Will shrugged. “Just something that Charlie once said to me.”

 

At Will’s first pre-natal checkup, Dr. Barrington did a transvaginal ultrasound to give him a peek at his (almost) baby, and detected a fetal heartbeat. It was strong, fast and steady, and right on schedule . . . In fact, on the early side, as Will had observed out loud, earning “Dr. McAvoy” an eye-roll from MacKenzie and a nod and smile from Catherine Barrington. 

The ten-week blood test for Down’s Syndrome and other chromosomal abnormalities came back strongly negative. Catherine told Mac and Will that the decision to have chorionic villus sampling or amniocentesis was up to them, but that she personally saw no reason to recommend it. “If you feel that you need to rule out absolutely any sort of chromosomal abnormality or feel that you must know about one in advance, then let’s do it,” she'd said, “but both CVS and amnio carry some minimal risk of miscarriage.” The doctor saw Mac pale at the word, and continued, “actually, that risk is probably slightly greater than the risk that your blood work could look like this,” she gestured at the lab report on her desk, “and the baby nonetheless have Down’s or trisomy 18 or some other major abnormality.” Will spent that evening researching CVS and amino on the Internet, after which they decided to pass and rely on the non-invasive tests and Dr. Barrington’s gut.

 

Will spent a lot of his time in the first few weeks after Charlie’s death being the Director of Morale for his new EP and for the new President of ACN. Both were suffering from performance insecurities that, to his way of thinking, were totally unfounded. Both, especially Mac, were also clearly grieving for Charlie. Mac was having trouble sleeping and twice he'd been awakened by the sounds of her having a nightmare, which from the words she’d spoken in her sleep (at least the ones that he could make out) seemed to be about death. Not surprising. She'd finally tearfully described the ambulance ride in detail for him, and the moment when she was certain Charlie had died as she'd clasped his hand and told him she'd take care of his boy and his network. Will hated himself for not being there with her and with Charlie. 

Charlie Skinner left such an enormous hole in all of their lives. It was interesting to Will that most of the time that it hit him, the times he descended into sadness and mourning for Charlie (and yes, mourning for John and Elizabeth McAvoy, as well) occurred at home, in the evenings, at night and on weekends, while for Mac, the days at ACN were the hardest. Of course, unlike him, she had to sit in Charlie’s office. And, he couldn't forget, the pregnancy had her hormones in overdrive, which made modulating her emotions all the more difficult. She had experienced one crying episode about a week and a half into her new position, that went on so long that a shaken Millie had appeared in Will’s office door to ask him to come upstairs with her and help comfort his wife.

At first, Mac had kept the office like a shrine despite Leona’s urging her to redecorate and make it hers. Then, about two weeks after Mac moved in, Nancy Skinner had called and announced that she was coming in to pack up Charlie’s things. Mac had been helping her for a couple of hours when Leona descended with furniture catalogs in hand. Although Mac had insisted that she had neither the time nor energy to pick out furniture, when Will walked by a little while later, he found the three of them pouring over a list of Mac’s selections, including a recliner that when upright could past muster in an office setting.

“You'll be thanking me for this one in a few months, McMac,” Leona’d said, tapping her finger on the photograph of the recliner. “Trust me, I know.” Then, she laughed her deep throaty laugh, a sound that had been missing around AWM since the sale of ACN to Pruit and Charlie’s death. At Mac’s stricken expression as she tried to imagine balancing breastfeeding and broadcasting, Lee wrapped her arm around Mac’s shoulder and squeezed. “Your going to do fine, kiddo,” she'd said, her intonation sounding so much like Charlie’s that Mac, Will and Nancy had all smiled.

 

Mac was not unaware that Jim and Will had some trust issues to work out, and could see that they were going through a period of adjustment. But since she assumed that this would have to happen anyway, seeing as how they would be “in-laws,” she decided that they might as well do it in the context of forging an “anchor-EP” partnership. As Director of Morale, Will had been trying to remember to encourage Jim to do things his own way instead of criticizing Jim for not doing things exactly the way Mac would have done. They had jokingly turned the Christian catch phrase, “WWJD?” into “WWMD?” as in “that was a WWMD? Moment,” to remind themselves to stop living with Mac’s ghost in the control room. 

However, Director of Morale or not, there were times, Will knew, when he couldn't stop himself from blaming Jim for not being the voice Will wanted in his ear. The friction on Jim’s side, Will realized, came from the fact that while Jim had taken Mac’s role in the studio, Will had taken over big parts of Jim’s role in Mac’s life, and it was clear that Jim doubted that Will was up to the job. This, added to the strain they were both under trying to figure out how to end run Pruit’s constant micromanaging of News Night’s content (other than complain to Mac, and neither of them liked putting anything more on her plate) made for some deep-seeded tension and volatile episodes. But in the final analysis, it seemed that no matter where their arguments started, their conflict always ended being about MacKenzie.

It came to a head on an unseasonably hot day in late July, during a period when MacKenzie, who was not sleeping well, was unusually upset and emotional with both of them. The three of them were in Will’s office, having a disagreement about the number of minutes in A block to allocate to some totally inconsequential story that Pruit was insisting they give special prominence. Mac offered a compromise that none of them liked and Will said something that sounded snarky. This set Mac off like a Roman candle, and she stormed out. After a moment contemplating her back, Jim rounded on Will.

“What I want to know is if you are ever going to own up to what you did to her?” Before Will could formulate a response, Jim plowed on. “I'm not stupid. I know that she wants you . . . Christ, she needs you . . . to live . . . and I know that life with you . . . is better for her than any alternative. But still . . . you seem to think that you can just put a ring on her finger and the past is all forgotten.” Jim was working himself into a frenzy, and Will imagined that this tirade had been a long time coming. “I just don't see it that way . . . “

“Neither do I,” Will interrupted, but Jim either didn't hear or paid no mind to the sound of Will’s voice.

“. . . throwing Brian in her face all the time, and then bringing him in to torture her in person . . . and Nina . . . where the fuck did that come from? You can't imagine what that did to her. And before . . . the stabbing, it wouldn't have have happened if she wasn't still . . . .” Jim paused, as if shifting gears. “I bet you don't even know that the summer is the hardest time for her. I assume that you guys broke up in the summer . . . .” Jim didn't see the slightly confused shake of Will’s head. “I don't . . . I don't know exactly what you did . . . but when she got to Atlanta . . . when I met her . . . she was . . . she was . . . broken. It was that way the whole time we were embedded. As far as I'm concerned, you need to fucking answer for almost killing her.”

A small part of Will’s consciousness was aware that broken was the same word Charlie had used to describe MacKenzie at their first meeting, but most of the cells in Will's brain were rushing to man the defensive barricades. How dare Jim say that he had almost killed Mac! How dare Jim imply that hurting Mac was something that he'd done purposefully . . . something he should answer for. Thoughts of Mac wronging him came to the fore. He was the victim! He was the good guy! 

"How do you know, it was me who broke her? And, what the fuck, I wasn't the one . . . I didn't cheat. She did. You don't know anything about what she did after we broke up. How do you know she didn't go back to Brian? How do you know it wasn't someone else she was with after me who messed her up?” Jesus! What was he saying? It sounded insane, selfish, pompous and ridiculous as soon as it was out of his mouth. There wasn't anyone after him. What the fuck was he doing? He needed to get control and think clearly.

Jim, who had been practically screaming, became deathly quiet and stayed that way long after Will stopped speaking. Then, Jim leaned across the desk toward Will. When he spoke, it was slowly and deliberately, and in a deadly tone of voice that Will didn't think he'd ever heard Jim use before. “You asshole,” Jim said. And then, leaning even further into Will’s personal space, his voice a menacing whisper, Jim answered Will’s questions. “Because . . . she talks in her sleep. When it's really bad, she has nightmares, and then she screams in her sleep . . . .” Jim paused, as if for effect. “Billy.” He spat out the last word as if it tasted bad.

Billy, the name Mac had give him, his favorite sound on Earth, felt like a bullet aimed straight for his heart. Will said nothing, which seemed to have the effect of spiking Jim’s anger.

"Jesus! You have no idea . . . do you?” Jim shouted once again, his voice anguished. “No fucking idea what she went through . . . what happened!" Jim’s face was a mask of rage and pain, and Will could see that he was near to tears. “Her parents . . . after Landstuhl . . . I don't know how they can stand to . . . I don't know how they can . . . .” Jim cut himself off and froze as though recognizing that he had crossed over a line.

“What?” Will asked, as calmly as he could force himself to speak, thinking of his Christmas trip to the UK where he had been accepted into the warm bosom of the McHale family. “You don't know how Mac’s parents can stand to what?” When Jim just shook his head, Will continued, “see me? Talk to me? Have me married to their daughter?” 

Because they love her that's why, Will answered his own questions in his head, as he thought of watching Margaret McHale standing on a bright December day, against the paneling just inside the doorway of the “morning room,” cup of tea in hand, watching Mackie put up good-naturedly with her sisters once again ogling and passing around her engagement ring. The look of contentment on Margaret’s face had been so touching that he'd spontaneously closed the distance between them and kissed her on the cheek. Ted and Margaret McHale, he thought, were undoubtedly the source of MacKenzie’s forgiving nature. One evening when they had a moment alone, Will had told Ted that he'd never stopped loving Mac even when he had his head up his ass. Mac’s father had put his arm around Will’s shoulders and told him that he had never doubted Will after he had seen with his own eyes how Will felt about Mackie. Then he'd said something about leopards not changing their spots, even when they try to dress up like some other animal. They can forgive me because they know me. Although it had never been said explicitly, Will sensed that Mac’s parents recognized that their daughter’s suffering was collateral damage from behavior that for him had been essentially a suicide attempt. But still . . . .

While Will ruminated, Jim stood like a deer in the headlights. Finally, Will spoke. “What happened with Mac’s parents in Landstuhl, Jim?”

“No,” the younger man croaked. “I can't. I shouldn't have . . .”

“No!” Will echoed, his voice now louder and more menacing. “You don't get to fucking do that! You don't get to bring up Mac’s parents and say you don't know how they can stand me . . . and then fucking retreat behind ‘I can't breach Mac’s confidences.’ You’ve got to finish it.” Jim had rarely heard Will McAvoy use this tone of voice. But it wasn't Will’s anger that got through to Jim. It was the pain in his eyes.

Will was right, Jim realized. He was torturing Will. Not that Will didn't deserve it, but maybe he didn't quite deserve this. And sowing seeds of doubt about Mac’s parents' acceptance of Will . . . he could only imagine how she would react if she knew he'd done this. So, he spoke.

“When we got her evacuated . . . out of Pakistan . . . .” Jim paused as if to regroup. “ After the stabbing, CNN arranged for her to be taken to Landstuhl. They let me go with her. She . . . when she was conscious, Mac kept asking for you . . . begging for you . . . begging to see Billy. On the plane, I kept telling her that Billy would be there when we got to Germany. I didn’t even know if she could hear me or understand what I was saying, and I had no idea who the fuck Billy was back then,” Jim looked helplessly at Will. “I just didn't know what else to do for her.”

Whatever Will had been expecting, it hadn't been this. He just stared at Jim, seemingly unable to speak. Horror, dread, fear and remorse began coursing through his system like some sort of drug transfusion.

“Mac’s parents arrived almost as soon as we got to Germany. They thought that she . . . was going . . . they thought that she was dying, see . . . we all did . . . .” Jim’s voice broke, and he choked back a sob, wiping at his eyes. “Fuck,” he said mostly to himself. “Since Charlie died . . . . “ Jim took a deep breath, and tried to compose himself. “Mac’s mother wanted to call you . . . said she was willing to get down on her knees to you . . .” Jim saw Will close his eyes, squeezing them tight. “She said that you couldn't be that cruel . . . that if you knew . . . you’d come . . . that you couldn't let Mac die asking for you. Her dad didn't seem to want to call you. And then, everything happened so fast. Things were worse than we thought . . . although, I think her dad knew . . . looking back, I think he knew how bad it was, and he didn't want to call you ‘cause he thought that there was no way that you could get there before she . . . died. But the doctors got her into surgery . . . her heart stopped . . . but she came through . . . and . . . .” Jim tried to shrug a sort of “that’s all” shrug, but Will didn't respond. “That's it,” Jim finally said aloud, “that's what I was thinking about. I'm not a parent, but I can't imagine what it would be like thinking that your kid’s about to die . . . and there’s only one thing . . . one person . . . she wants . . . and you can't help her.”

Somewhere in the middle of Jim’s description of the events in Landstuhl, Will had begun to feel his hands and feet going numb, and his throat and chest tighten almost unbearably. Now the feeling had traveled up his extremities so that he felt paralyzed. All he could feel was the pain roiling in his gut. But his gorge was rising and he realized that unless he wanted to vomit on his office floor, he was going to have to get his body to respond enough to get him into the bathroom. Will knew that Mac had been playing down the seriousness of the stabbing, but this . . . Jim’s description . . . Margaret’s desperation. . . dear God . . . Mac’s heart had stopped. Will couldn't breathe. 

He propelled himself out of his chair by sheer determination and staggered into his bathroom. He tried to lean against the washstand, but he knees would no longer support him. She had called for him. Her heart had stopped. She had needed him and he had failed her. Margaret and Ted had stood in a hospital corridor and argued over whether to call him, believing that they were going to lose MacKenzie. He couldn't let himself imagine their emotions for more than a few seconds without risking a descent into madness. Tears and bile welled up, as he doubled over and sank to the floor in front of the toilet. What had he thought back then? What had he known about the stabbing from his contacts at CNN? He couldn't remember. He'd been so determined to put her out of his mind . . . to prove to himself that he didn't need her . . . or care about her . . . that it was irrelevant whether she lived or died. Died. Died. His MacKenzie . . . his wife had almost died . . . begging to see him. He vomited up the contents of his stomach, and then doubled over and sobbed, tasting salt and regret.

From the sounds coming through the door, Jim had a fairly good idea what was going on in the bathroom. He wondered if he should be gone when Will came out, but decided to remain where he was. It was almost fifteen minutes later when the bathroom door opened. Will was white as a sheet, but composed, with his clothes straightened and his hair freshly combed. Jim sent a fleeting prayer skyward asking that wherever Mac was she should stay there, and not walk in on this scene.

“Nightmares,” Will began without preamble, and surprising Jim with the change of subject.

Sitting in the bathroom, trying to pull himself together sufficiently to walk back out to Jim, Will had realized that there would be plenty of time for remorse. His first priority was to take care of MacKenzie. He'd been hit by the reality of the pregnancy and the context in which it was occurring . . . he'd let Leona put his pregnant wife in a position where all of the burden of running an ACN that was owned by Lucas Pruit was on her back. He knew Mac would label such thoughts sexist, but he wondered if he needed his head examined. 

Mac had had three nightmares since their engagement. The first two, the one about Nina, after the visit to his apartment, and the one the night of Charlie’s death, had been . . . he guessed that manageable was the word. But the third a couple of weeks ago had scared the shit out of him. Mac had been under so deep that waking her had been almost impossible. She had seemed to be having trouble breathing and she'd screamed for Billy, like Jim said, and, as best as he could make out, begged him . . . Billy . . . to forgive her for “letting him die,” which Will interpreted as not keeping Charlie alive. Jim knew about her nightmares. He had experience helping her through them. Will realized that he needed to stop fighting with Jim and listen to him. This wasn't about Will McAvoy. Who gave a fuck whether he'd been hurt too. Mac had been badly damaged by the events of the last six years. Whatever she’d done, she'd paid a heavy price, too heavy. Charlie had been telling him this since the day he’d said he'd hired MacKenzie. But Charlie was gone. The thought sliced through him. He took a deep calming breath. Now he had Jim, and Jim could help him help Mac.

“I'm sorry . . .” Jim started to say when Will waved him off.

“I want to know about her nightmares. I want to know what happened . . . What you experienced with her in the Middle East. What you did to help her.”

Now Jim looked uncomfortable, as he always did when called upon to do anything that he thought Mac might not want him to do. “I . . . well . . . I don't . . . Shouldn't you . . . ask her?”

“Yes,” Will said, “and I will, but now I'm asking you. I'm asking for your perspective. I need your help.”

“She's been having nightmares.” Jim's tone made it more of a statement than a question. “She told me that she wasn't . . . that with you . . . things were better.”

“She's had two since Charlie . . . Charlie’s death,” Will replied. “One was minor. The other was . . . bad.” 

“Well, considering that we just got through June and she didn't call me while you were locked up, I guess, she was telling me the truth. Things are better since you pulled your head out of your ass.” Jim looked a little sheepish. “I didn't mean . . . “

“I was being an asshole,” Will said, “an hour ago and for the six years before Election Night. You were right, so there’s no need to apologize or feel embarrassed. My last EP called me an ‘arse’ fairly regularly.” Will half-smiled a boyish, self-deprecating, honest smile, and Jim thought that this . . . this side of Will McAvoy . . . was why Mac was so desperately in love with him. Then, Will's face grew somber. 

“Jim, I want . . . I need . . . to hear what she was like when you met and what happened in the Middle East.” Jim could see the emotions playing on the older man’s face. Will took a deep breath to steady himself. “I regret so many of the things I did . . . did to her, and so many things I didn't do for her. But this isn't about me or my regrets. As I said, I need your help. So, first, I want to know about the nightmares.”

Jim looked at Will for a long time and then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Let's start there.”

 

What an awful fucking day this one was turning out to be, MacKenzie thought, rubbing her forehead as she stared at the note Millie had left on her desk. Pruit wanted to see her ASAP. She had just come from an unpleasant discussion with her husband and surrogate kid brother, and now she gets a confrontation with Pruit! She knew it would be a confrontation because with Pruit, everything was a confrontation. Okay, she thought, let's get on with it. She dropped the note and walked down the hall to the office that Pruit was renting from AWM. 

As she walked, MacKenzie recalled a conversation that she’d had with Leona a week or two after she had assumed Charlie’s job (she always thought of it still as Charlie’s job). Mac had barged into Leona’s office, distraught over another unpleasant disagreement with Pruit. “Why did you give me this job?” she'd asked, unable to keep the waver out of her voice that signaled that she was near to tears with frustration.

Leona had looked up from the papers she was reading and removed her glasses before answering. “I didn't,” she said.

“Oh, don't say that Pruit did. You know exactly what I mean,” Mac shot back, in no mood for word games.

Leona laughed. “I wasn't going to say that Pruit did.” She paused and waited until she had Mac’s complete attention. “Charlie Skinner gave you the job. So, if you don't like it, you’re just going to have to wait fifty years and take it up when you see him.”

“Charlie . . . “ Mac had echoed in a whisper. It was the last thing that she had expected to hear. She sat down heavily in one of Leona’s visitors’ chairs. “Charlie? When?”

“Shortly after he brought you here,” Leona said, “I asked him if he knew what the hell he was doing hiring you as Will’s EP, and he told me that he was pretty sure that he did. He said that first, he was saving Will’s life because he was afraid that Will couldn’t go on much longer without the misery and loneliness taking a toll on his health, and that even Will couldn't keep his head up his ass indefinitely if he had to confront the only person he'd ever truly needed on a daily basis.” Mac had smiled, remembering Charlie saying something similar to her right before her arrival in New York. “He said that second, he was doing his best to make News Night the most respected daily newscast on cable, and third, he was securing the future of ACN by choosing his own successor.” Mac swallowed and kept listening, fairly sure that Leona wasn't finished. “He said that you would be the perfect foil for Reese, that you two would fight like cats and dogs, but you’d respect each other. He’d laugh and say that we'll just sit back in our dotage and rock and watch the show.” At this, Leona’s composure slipped, and she'd brought her hand up to cover her mouth, as her eyes glistened with tears. She had turned quickly away, and then, replacing her glasses, went silently back to her work. She seemed so alone. Mac always wanted to reach out to her at moments like this, but never managed to bridge the gap, overcome the intimidation factor, and so once again, Mac had turned around and left Leona to mourn in private. 

Pruit started ranting the minute Mac entered his office. He'd heard a rumor that she was pregnant, and demanded to know if it was true, and why hadn't he been told sooner. Mac stopped for a second, taken aback. Of course, everyone connected with New Night knew about the baby, but none of them would talk to or in front of Pruit. Shit! Most likely, something must have been overheard by one of the techies that Pruit still had dogging Neal's steps. ACN Digital’s computer stations were in the News Night bull pen. Shit! She'd hoped to have been able to pick the time and place for this battle. 

While Pruit was repeating himself without leaving her an opening to give him the answers he was demanding, MacKenzie replayed another conversation with Leona in her mind. “This pregnancy is about to make you the most powerful woman in media. For the next six months, McMac, you will be undisputed Queen of cable news. Pruit won't be able to lift a finger against you, and if he's too stupid to see it, his PR people, not to mention his HR counsel, will recognize it the instant he tells them about the baby.” Mac closed her eyes for a moment, drawing strength from the memory of Lee’s statements and her throaty chuckle.

“I’m about ten weeks pregnant,” Mac said, still making the mistake of counting from the night she was sure her child had been conceived, rather than counting from her last period the way that Catherine did it. Besides, shaving a few weeks in this conversation could only inure to her benefit. Pruit didn't give her the chance to say more. Instead, red-faced, he launched into a tirade about how he needed the person who was running ACN to be able to focus on the job and not on personal issues, and to be able to come to the studio everyday unencumbered by worries about family.

Finally unable to stop herself, MacKenzie interrupted him. “In other words, Lucas, you want the President of ACN to be a man, or I should say, to be your idea of a man. Well, it seems that that ship has sailed. I've been doing this job everyday for three weeks now, and for every one of those days, I've been a pregnant woman. I intend to continue to do this job to the very best of my ability for the remainder of my pregnancy unless you choose to relieve me of my post. But just in case you are considering that, be advised that I will fight you for my job to the fullest extent of the law. I didn't want it until I learned that it was Charlie Skinner’s wish that I should succeed him. Now, I wouldn’t give it up for anything.” For once, Pruit sat still and just listened.

“So, it is unfortunate that you find my condition upsetting, and that you believe that it makes me less able to run this network.” Mac smiled. “However, I'm quite confident that your PR firm is going to be thrilled. So, why don't you call them, and tell them the good news. I'm sure they can help you feel better . . .” You misogynistic little weasel, she finished silently in her mind. “Now, if that is all, I have a call with Hillary Clinton in ten minutes.” When he still said nothing, she smiled and walked out of his office. 

Recounting her conversation with Pruit to Leona later that day, Mac felt upbeat, a feeling that lasted all the way through watching News Night on one of her office monitors, and having it's debonair anchor appear in her office door in a blue sweater that matched his eyes. She had learned young that getting unpleasant things over with and off of her chest had always been a satisfying experience . . . well, almost always . . . there had, of course, been at least one glaring and catastrophic exception . . . but she wasn't going to think about that now. She was thinking of all of the ways she was going to thwart Pruit’s attempts to remake ACN into . . . well, she wasn't sure even how to describe whatever it was that he thought he wanted, nor, she suspected after two weeks of daily contact with the man, could Pruit. 

Pruit’s public relations firm, as she'd suspected they would, wasted no time before “leaking” the pregnancy, and by 10:00 PM, speculation and rumors about the “McBaby” (Mac had just rubbed her temples at that one) were lighting up the Internet. Fortified by her newfound body armor, earlier in the day, Mac had told the ad agency that she would not be buying anymore airtime on competing networks for the painful “urine” television spots. She'd already started phasing them out on ACN whenever it would not leave dead air. While not exactly a threat to democracy, the ads were, as she'd expressed to Charlie, hideous and demeaning to every bureau, department and journalist at ACN. Nancy had revealed Charlie’s true opinion of the ads, which aligned totally with hers and Don’s, and now she felt that removing them from the air would be a kind of tribute to him. In the car on the ride home, she wondered to herself, smiling, what Pruit would say if she replaced them with ads that said “we r acn,” or maybe “acn r us.” 

Taking off her shoes in the bedroom, Mac observed to herself that it was good to be home. The apartment was coming along nicely, almost finished really. They still hadn't picked out a bed, and the baby’s room was still piled high with boxes packed in their old apartments which needed to be opened and their contents sorted, but other than that the place was feeling like a permanent home. Mac had talked Will out of his initial reaction that they should sell the place and buy a house in the suburbs with a yard. She’d pointed out that it would be quite a while before he and his progeny would be throwing passes in the backyard, and in the meantime while the baby was little being relatively close to the AWM building was more than ample compensation for going yard-less. Yes, she thought, this was home.

Over dinner, Mac resumed her running monologue of ways to outsmart Pruit, and was still at it when they climbed into bed. Mac had observed from the couple of rare nights since his release when they had just fallen into bed and groaned “goodnight” and “I love you,” that Will seemed more likely to awaken during the night missing the prison sounds if she failed to tire him out with late-night sex. Usually, it put her soundly to sleep as well, but that night, when she heard Will descend into sleep, his breathing becoming slow and rhythmic, she had started to think of ways to manipulate Pruit into agreeing to replace one of the “entertainment news” shows with an economic issues round table that Sloan had pitched her. 

The next morning, MacKenzie was just as revved up as she had been the night before. Wrapping her body around Will, who tried to feign being still asleep, she kept up a running monologue of her plans and strategies for “winning back ACN.” After a few minutes, Will threw in the towel and got up to make protein shakes for breakfast. While they drank, he lectured Mac, who’d followed him to the kitchen still talking about Pruit, on the benefits during pregnancy of a low fat, high protein meal for breakfast and snack at bedtime.

“I know, I know. Why do you think that you came home to a kitchen equipped with a blender, protein powder, almond milk, chia seeds and organic fruit in the freezer.” Then suddenly, a memory of pain and loneliness swamped her. Will saw her face fall seconds before she ran to him and burrowed herself into his chest. “Billy,” she said softly, her words muffled by his t-shirt, “please don't ever leave me like that again.”

"I . . . " he paused, thinking how easy it would be to promise never, never to be separated from her again, but suddenly every promise had taken on a new solemnity. Christ, the last thing he'd wanted was to be led away from MacKenzie in handcuffs minutes after they’d been married (although it had provided their friends with the opportunity to tell a lifetime’s worth of annulment jokes). How can I promise that nothing like that will ever happen again? Wow, am I ever over thinking this, Will observed to himself when Mac’s head came up to look into his eyes. “I never want to be parted from you ever, and I will do my best to see that it never happens again,” he said. “I’m so sorry that you had to live through even one day of being pregnant alone.” Something he couldn't read clouded her eyes for just an instant. At least, he thought it had. It was hard to tell since it had been replaced so quickly by her dazzling smile.

Then, she began to kiss him, and he scooped her up and took her back to bed.

Later, while standing in the master bathroom, his wife again began to talk about her plans for ACN and how she would never let Pruit turn “what Charlie and Leona had built” into “some sort of crowd-sourced cesspool of garbage.” Will laughed as in her exuberance, she choked on her toothpaste. Then, affecting a growling British accent, he began to speak, “we shall go on to the end, we shall fight in New York, we shall fight on the dayside and in prime time, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the board room, we shall defend our network, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight in the editing room, we shall fight in the control room, we shall fight at the anchor desk, and in the streets, we shall fight in the bull pen and we shall never surrender.”

Mac laughed. “I'm impressed. You really know Churchill’s Dunkirk speech to the House of Commons that well?”

Will ignored her. “Pruit doesn't stand a chance . . . You’re like that . . . like Churchill . . . ”

“Why, thank you.”

“. . . an English bulldog. There’s no cause so lost that it should not be undertaken. No fight so difficult that it should not be attempted. My, God, when I think that you came back to me . . . took Charlie’s offer.” He smiled over at her and then moved to her side. “Now that’s pluck!”

“Pluck?” she asked, “seriously, pluck?” Her eyes crinkled the way he loved them to do, and she turned toward him like a ship to the dock. He found it difficult to describe his response to the sight of MacKenzie when she told him she loved him with her eyes. It was so multifaceted that it defied simple description, even by a lawyer-journalist, whose life’s work was condensing concepts and experiences into words. But he knew that the idea that he was the source of the emotions on her face made him giddy and lightheaded. Or perhaps the lightheaded sensation was a result of all of his blood once again rushing to his groin. Either way, Will wrapped his wife in his arms and asked a question that he never would have asked if he hadn't been relaxed by sex and love, wouldn’t have asked if he'd censored the conversation. For the first time ever, Will McAvoy jokingly brought up their breakup.

“Pluck,” he repeated, “all you English are plucky.” She gave him her “I'm an American” scowl. “Pluck,” he continued, undeterred, “and determination and stubbornness and . . . .” He began to plant featherlight kisses on her neck after reciting each characteristic. “. . . courage and risk-taking . . .”

“And evidence of PTSD,” Mac joked in a low, sultry and aroused voice, keeping her head thrown back and her eyes closed.

“Oh, come on,” he joked back, now rubbing her breast under her sleep shirt, for which action, he was rewarded with an unbelievably arousing moan. “You’ve always been that way. You’re the Ambassador’s daughter. It's the McHale way . . . or maybe it's an Ailesbury thing . . . but it's in the blood.” He continued to punctuate his speech with kisses and his hand found its way to the soft folds between MacKenzie’s legs. “I mean . . . when did you give up on my being any sort of rational and stop communicating daily? It took months.”

Reflecting on it later, it seemed to Mac that the cells of her brain that contained the answer to his question fired off and sent the data directly to her vocal cords without passing through her prefrontal cortex for screening and evaluation. Shit! If she hadn't been aroused out of her mind, if she'd had a mind that wasn't still addled by lust and sensation, if she'd listened carefully to Will’s question, if . . . if . . . if . . . if Tapley had been on the show instead of Dantana’s guy . . . . Fuck!

“That’s easy,” she'd said, not even hearing herself until she'd finished and the words hung in the air, “June 8th 2007.”


	2. Secrets

She needed to laugh . . . just laugh . . . just say it was a joke.

Will was laughing. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she felt him pull away and burst out laughing. “You gave me a date. Seriously? You actually gave me a specific date when time was up. I suppose it goes with the twenty-eight months that is the proper time for someone to be angry about being cheated on?”

He was so busy laughing that he hadn't noticed her hands start shaking or her face pale or her breathing become rapid, and, of course, he couldn't hear that her heart was pounding a tattoo in sixteenth notes in her ears. He was distracted and this was a tremendous boon. All she had to do was join him in the joke. She knew that. Tell him that yes, saying June 8th, 2007, had been just like decreeing that after twenty-eight months, he should have forgiven her. It was just a random date she'd plucked from the air. She could convince him. Smile, she commanded herself. Breathe normally and smile, laugh, and everything would be fine. Her secret would be safe. If only she could make her body obey. Calm down and put a smile on her face. But that was the thing about PTSD . . . sometimes it was impossible to get her body to obey.

Shit! She could tell by the sudden change in his expression that he'd noticed some aspect of her distress. As it always had, this seemed to provide her with the impetus that she needed to get it together . . . well, at least, more together.

“Mac? Are you . . . “

“Joking, of course.” She gave him what she thought was a winning smile. “It was about three, three and a half months, maybe almost four, when I decided that I needed to give the attempts at communicating a rest, but a day . . . of course, I don't remember a specific day, silly.” Mac reached up and cupped Will’s chin in her hands. She knew they were colder than usual, but she desperately needed to do something to get his eyes off of her. So, she did the first thing that popped into her head. She kissed him. It was a mistake, she knew, as soon as the softness of his lips brushed hers. A wave of grief swamped her, as a sob rose in her throat, and she trembled in his arms. She leaned in, deepening the kiss, closing her eyes to contain the hot tears that threatened to spill, trying to turn the sounds of pain into the moans of passion. 

When they broke apart for air, Will studied her once again. Her eyes seemed too bright and her breathing just a little too rapid even for someone who had just given him a kiss with enough electricity in it to make his hair stand on end. Something was wrong and he knew it. He just had no idea what it was. But he had been around MacKenzie for enough years to tell that he wasn't going to learn anything from her that morning. As soon as the kiss concluded, she was in motion. Busily dressing and preparing for the day. 

“Come on, Billy. Better get yourself going. We’re going to be late, and something tells me that I'm going to have Lucas Pruit in my office at nine on some pretense so that he can check on the time I arrive. I'm not going to give him the satisfaction of thinking that since I'm pregnant, I can't get to the office on time.”

Okay, he thought. He'd drop it for now. But he was determined to figure out the significance of June 8, 2007, and why she'd named it as the day she'd given up on him.

 

The phone buzzed, disturbing Leona’s concentration. She was studying the results of a poll she had commissioned on Will McAvoy and News Night. Since his release from the federal lockup, he was, if the data in front of her was as representative of the general population as Reese claimed, the most respected journalist since Walter Cronkite. Well, she thought, she'd told him to get the trust of the public back. Except it was supposed to be for her ACN, for Charlie’s ACN, not for Lucas Pruit. Damn Arthur Lansing! Damn him and his spawn to the furthest reaches of Hell! He'd had the last laugh from the grave, cutting Reese out of his trust. Publicly, throwing her . . . mistake . . . no, never mistake . . . her love . . . into her face. Strange that no one who knew about Reese being excluded from the inheritance had ever asked why. Not even Reese . . . until after he knew the reason. Were they all too polite, or hadn’t they put it together?

“Mrs. Lansing,” Barbara’s smooth voice purred through the speaker when Leona hit the respond button. “Mrs. Skinner is on line 1.” Jesus! How's that for timing, Leona thought.

"Nancy."

“Lee.” 

Leona was aware that neither asked the other how she was doing. “Lee, I have some shopping to do in town, and Mac emailed me that the furniture was in so I thought that I'd stop by and see how the office looks, and . . . well . . . if you are going to be in this afternoon . . . I have some things that I found in Charlie’s . . . in the papers that I took from Charlie’s office . . . that . . . I know he would want you to have.”

For some reason that she couldn't identify, a feeling of dread came over Leona Lansing. “Certainly. I'll be here and I'd love to see you,” she made herself say. “We’ll have coffee on the terrace and then go down and hassle McMac. She's starting to show.” Lee chuckled. “Wait till she gets to the everybody feels free to touch your belly stage.”

When Nancy was done laughing too, she said, “Fine. I should be able to get there by two.” Nancy paused as though she were going to say more, but thought better of it. “Yes,” she said instead, “I'll see you around two.”

Promptly at two o'clock, Barbara announced that Mrs. Skinner had arrived.

Nancy looked good, Leona observed, probably as good as one could look under the circumstances. The women embraced, murmuring greetings, and then both sat down in the conversation area of Leona’s office. Nancy began speaking first.

“I've seen a bit of Reese these last few weeks.”

“Oh?” This was news to Leona.

“Yes. He's been hanging out with Sophie.” Nancy sighed. “He's really the only person she can . . . or will . . . talk to.”

“She's at a bad age to lose her father,” Leona said, and then, smiling ruefully, she gave a soft snort. “Not that there's really a good age. Charlie's surrogate children are suffering too. Will’s still struggling. So’s McMac.”

“Reese too,” Nancy replied quietly, “A lot, I mean.” Then, she continued with anger and passion in her voice, “it's all been so fucked up . . . everything . . . since that damned take over attempt engineered by Boobies and Butthead. . . .”

“Excuse me . . . “ Leona interrupted, laughing in spite of herself, “Boobies and Butthead?”

Nancy laughed back. “It's what Sophie and Reese call the twins. Have for years. I'm surprised you’ve never heard it before. It's a play on Beavis and Butthead.”

“Yes, I gathered that,” Leona said, still smiling and shaking her head.

“I want to thank you for Reese, Lee. I don't know how Sophie would be surviving . . . “ Nancy’s voice cracked, as her eyes filled with tears and her right hand flew up to her lips. Leona reached over a squeezed Nancy’s left hand where it rested on the chair cushion. “Sophie and Katy . . . They’re like oil and water . . . or, maybe, I should say, fire and gasoline. They always have been. Maybe nine years is just too far apart. And, Katy always felt that Charlie favored Sophie . . . that he thought that Sophie was smarter than she. Maybe that's why Katy married so young, why she got pregnant with Beau. I don't know . . . .”

Nancy paused and looked directly at Leona. “I meant what I said. Thank you for Reese. He's the best big brother a mother could ask for.” Something in Nancy’s voice made the feeling of dread rekindle in the pit of Leona’s stomach.

Nancy reached down into the brief case that she had rested at her feet, and removed a manila file folder. “These were in Charlie's papers,” she said, handing the folder to Leona. When Lee just put it in her lap, Nancy gestured to the folder and said, “there’s a letter in there. It's addressed to Reese, but . . . I thought that . . . you might want to read it first . . . and decide whether you want . . . .” When she saw Leona’s eyebrows rise in surprise, she hastily, but calmly, added, “I didn't read beyond the first few sentences.”

Leona opened the folder. Inside were clippings from newspapers. She turned through them sufficiently to see that they were all about her son, beginning with the short announcement of the birth of Reese Nelson Lansing that had appeared in the New York Times. In the margin, in Charlie's handwriting were Reese’s initials, “RNL” written over and over again. All of the color drained from Leona’s face. Nancy simply sat still. Leona looked at the envelope. On the outside Charlie had simply written, “Reese.”

“It wasn't sealed.” Nancy said. Leona nodded. Slowly she opened the envelope and removed the letter. It consisted of two or three pages of ruled yellow legal sized paper in Charlie’s handwriting. It wasn't dated. “Dear Reese,” it began, “If you are reading this, then I am dead, and your mother has decided that you should know what I'm about to say. You are my son. You were conceived in Saigon just before it fell to the NVA. I want you to know that I loved – love – your mother more than you can ever imagine.”

A searing pain ripped through Leona, as hot tears filled her eyes. Charlie! Oh, God, Charlie! What have you done? She needed to move! Just move! Jumping up, the contents of her lap spilling to the floor, Leona Lansing strode across her office and out the door to her private terrace.

 

Will looked up from his computer. His internet search had yielded him nothing. June 8, 2007. The Pittsburgh Pirates lost to the New York Yankees. The first elected President of Somalia died in a Kenyan hospital at the age of 90 something. It was the start of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. A cargo ship ran aground in Australia. Nothing that Will could find on the internet seemed to tie in anyway to anything that would be significant to, let alone upset, MacKenzie, or motivate her to give up on getting through to him. And so, having come up empty on the internet, Will tried another approach.

Darius Walker, now CNN’s New York Bureau Chief, had been the Senior Director of News Coverage in the Washington office when Will and Mac had been there. Will looked up as he entered the restaurant and beckoned him to the secluded corner table where Will had bribed the maitre’ d to seat him. 

"Will McAvoy," Darius boomed. “Good to see you, buddy. It's been a long time. Too long.” They hadn’t seen each other since Will left CNN, although they had spoken on the phone a few times. Will had called in August 2007, to congratulate Walker on being made CNN’s New York Bureau Chief, but everything had been too raw then for Will to be willing or able to see anyone who reminded him of MacKenzie. Then, he and Walker had drifted apart, and the relationship devolved to exchanging Christmas cards and the occasional phone call. The last time they had communicated before Will spoke to him to set up the lunch was when Walker had called to congratulate Will when his engagement to MacKenzie became public knowledge. 

Will stood and embraced his former boss. “Damn, you’re looking good,” Walker said, giving Will the once over up and down. “You’re in better shape than you were in seven years ago.”

“Well, there wasn't much to do other than exercise in solitary confinement in a federal lock up, and Mac makes sure we eat healthy.”

“Yeah,” Walker shook his head. “I heard someone say a few years back that McAvoy’ll do anything for ratings, but I'd never have thought of prison, baby.” Will winced slightly. Darius guffawed. “I'm just yanking your chain. But you’ve been killing us in the 8:00 pm slot since you got back. I'm trying to figure out how to get a couple of my guys locked up.” Walker smiled again. “And, as for MacKenzie . . . that woman is the best thing that ever happened to you . . . always was . . . .”

“Don't doubt for a minute that I don't know it,” Will interrupted.

“Yeah, well, it took you long enough.”

“That seems to be the general consensus.” Now it was Will’s turn to smile, thinking of kissing Mac in the alcove by the News Desk on Election Night.

“So, are the baby rumors true?” Will’s smile broadened, but before he could answer, the waiter appeared at their table to take their order. 

“Yes,” Will said when the waiter departed.

“Yes, what?” Darius asked slightly confused. Then, realizing that Will was answering his last question, he grinned. “No, shit. That’s great!” Then a second level of realization dawned on him. “Holy Mother! The President of ACN is pregnant!” Will gave him a rueful smile. “What? You’re not happy about it?”

“The baby? No! Christ! I'm thrilled. It's just the job. There’s so much stress and . . . .” Will trailed off, not wanting to go into the finer points of daily dealings with ACN’s new owner to a representative of his chief competition.

“Well, if anyone can carry it off, it's MacKenzie McHale,” Walker replied. “I never thought much of Pruit . . . met him a couple of times . . . until he picked Mac to run ACN.”

“Well, don't form the Lucas Pruit Fan Club just yet, but, yeah, putting Mac in charge gives us a fighting chance to keep Charlie Skinner’s dream alive.”

Walker sobered. “Will, I'm really sorry about Charlie. He was a great journalist, and he built ACN, and he had the . . . I don't know . . . faith, I guess, to bring Mac in as your EP. Don't tell my boss, but I’ve really been a fan of News Night these last few years. You do great things when she's in your ear.” Walker paused. “But I guess she's not in your ear any longer, is she?”

“Nope. Jim Harper’s my EP.”

“Harper. The kid from Atlanta that Mac took over to the Middle East with her?”

“The one and only.”

The food was served, and as they ate, Will caught up on Darius's life. Finally, as they each stirred their coffee, Will brought up the subject that had caused him to arrange the lunch in the first place. 

"Darius,” Will, began, clearing his throat and feeling suddenly reticent. “I'm trying to reconstruct some events from the Summer of 2007, and . . . um . . . I was wondering if you can . . . will . . . help me.”

“What events? Something at CNN?” Then, looking more closely at Will’s expression, Walker answered his own question. “Something to do with Mac . . . after you left for New York,” he said. Will nodded.

“I don't know what happened with you two,” Walker began before Will could speak. “She wouldn't say, and you ran off . . . back to Charlie Skinner . . . so fast. Once when I started going off about you, she told me to stop and said that it was completely her fault, but that’s all she would say.” Walker paused, but when Will didn’t respond, he continued. “Have you ever tried to keep an orchid alive?” Darius asked.

Will thought a minute, surprised at the seeming non sequitur, and then shook his head.

“I have. I love the things, but I just can't get them to thrive. After a few weeks, no matter what I do, they start to wither and die.” He paused, took a deep breath. “That's what it was like with MacKenzie after you ran back to Skinner.”

Will looked for a second like he was going to protest and say that he hadn't “run” anywhere. He had just been getting out of Washington so Mac didn't have to move. However, upon reflection, he saw that Walker was right. He had run to Charlie, taken his broken heart and sought the comfort of his surrogate father.

Walker continued. “You had Skinner, but Mac . . . she had no one. I tried . . . but . . . .” Walker raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “It was like watching one of those orchids. No matter what I did, she just got thinner and thinner, and more and more pale and . . . lifeless. God,” he said scrubbing his face with his hands at the memory, “I knew she wasn't eating or sleeping. Her eyes . . . God.” As Walker spoke, Will thought about the days and weeks after the Genoa retraction when he had watched Mac’s guilt tearing her apart and producing much the same physical decline. “So, what about the Summer of 2007 are you interested in?” Darius asked.

The question brought Will back from memories of Mac on Election Day. He could still see so clearly the exhaustion and pain on her face in the Hair and Make-up Room when he'd told her he'd returned the ring, the ring that was bought as a joke. He cleared his throat and asked the question he'd come to ask. “Do you remember. . . or can you find out where Mac was in the first half of June . . . on June 8th to be specific.”

“There’s a reason you don't want to ask your wife?” 

“Yeah,” Will replied.

Darius Walker thought for a long time, looking into his coffee cup. Will took a couple of sips of his. Seeing a lull in what must have appeared to even the most casual observer to be a serious conversation, the waiter swooped in to freshen their cups. Will nodded his thanks. Walker didn't seem to notice the man.

Finally, he spoke. “That summer, she did a piece in Afghanistan, produced it,” Walker said slowly, trying to recall the details from six years before, “but I don't think that it was as early as June cause the thing didn't air until the end of August or beginning of September . . . no, end of August, right as I was getting ready to leave for New York. Yeah, now I remember, the crew didn't leave for Kabul until July something, but I don’t think that Mac was with them.”

“She was already over there?” Will asked.

“Give me a minute . . . Let me think. This was six years ago for Christ’s sake.” Walker furrowed his brow and thought for a long time. Finally, he sighed. “Okay,” he said at length. “It's kinda coming back to me.” Again, Walker paused. “What's Mac told you about that time?” He asked.

Nothing, Will thought. He hadn't asked. How could he ask? What could he say, tell me how hard it was for you when I wouldn't listen . . . when I cut you off? Christ! Almost involuntarily, Will shook his head.

“Privileged communications, uh?” Walker seemed to be deciding how candid he cared to be. “Okay.” He nodded. “Well, like I said, she had a real hard time. You were gone. She didn't get along with the new guy, or he . . . I don't know. We had her fill in a bit on some other things, but, well, as good as she is, she was having a hard time concentrating. She was . . . well, blowing things, you know. She knew it.” 

Will tried to school his face not to show any emotion, as the meal he'd just consumed churned in his gut and sickened him. This description of Mac was so different from the fantasy he'd constructed . . . the fantasy in which he'd been the only one affected by the breakup, the only one to feel the pain of separating. 

“Anyway,” Walker continued, “finally, she came to me and asked for help. I made a deal with her that if she'd take some time off . . . she had weeks of vacation coming . . . and get it together, I'd get her the gig in Afghanistan. It was an easy piece. Fluff and filler about social service projects in the Green Zone. Mac could produce it with one hand tied behind her back. And, she did a good job, as I recall. Everybody was happy with it.”

Will found his voice. “When did she leave on vacation?”

“I can't give you a date. Sometime in the beginning of June.”

“Do you remember. . . did you know where she went? I mean did she leave town?”

“Yeah, that was part of our deal. She had to get out of town.”

“Do you know where she went?”

“Well, I didn't drive her to Dulles or anything so I couldn't swear where she went or that she went,” Darius said giving Will a smile in an attempt to lift the weight of the somber mood that had overtaken both men. “But she told me that she was going to go home.”

“Home?”

“Yeah, to England to visit her family.”

Will nodded, trying to hide his shock. She'd been with her parents, maybe her brothers and sisters too, when she'd decided to give up on him.


	3. Revelations

Leona leaned on the terrace railing and looked out on the blur of shapes and colors into which her tears had transformed the New York skyline. She had no tissues and she was sure that her mascara was everywhere, but for once in her life, she didn't give a fucking damn what she looked like. She had never wanted to hurt Nancy. She'd told herself that when she'd asked Charlie to come to Nantucket that terrible day when she thought Reese might die, when the hospital was running out of AB negative blood, the rare type that Reese and Charlie shared. She'd told herself that when she'd asked him to help her build ACN into something they could be proud of, something she . . . they . . . could leave to Reese. She'd told herself that she didn't want to hurt Nancy on the few occasions when her resolve and self control had faltered, on Nantucket and twice in New York, when she had allowed . . . encouraged . . . .

Leona heard the terrace door open. “Lee. You’ve been out here for quite a while.” Nancy’s voice. Leona didn't move. “Lee, I'm sure that Charlie didn't write the letter to hurt you . . . or upset you. If you don't want Reese to know . . . .” Leona turned. The guilt and grief in her eyes pierced Nancy. She wanted to wrap her arms around the other woman, but somehow felt that it wasn't the time. Instead she spoke. “Lee, I knew Charlie was coming to me . . . to our marriage . . . with a broken heart. We were honest with each other. We had a good marriage.”

“He told you?” Leona whispered.

“Some things. Not that Reese was his son, although I’ve suspected almost . . . well, for a long time, and I've been sure for several years. Come on in and I'll tell you all of it if you’d like to hear.”

The woman at the edge of the terrace straightened her shoulders, becoming Leona Lansing once again. "Alright. Why don't you ask Barbara to bring us something to drink. Tea, coffee, bourbon . . . your choice. I'm going to take a few minutes in the bathroom and redo my make up before anybody else sees me like this and runs away screaming in horror.” She tried a weak smile.

When they were seated comfortably with cups of tea into which Nancy had poured shots of bourbon, she began to describe the early years of her marriage and how she had come to accept that there was and always would be a piece of Charlie that “was closed off and inaccessible . . . that had been left behind in Vietnam . . . left with you. Don't forget,” Nancy continued, “I was in this business . . . well, the print side of it, and I knew a lot of people who remembered you and Charlie over there. After a while, Charlie and I talked about it some. He never told me what happened, and I never asked. He did tell me that he hadn't seen you in years, and had only spoken to you on the telephone a few times. He almost never lied to me. Not until Nantucket.”

Nantucket. Leona swallowed another sip of tea as memories washed over her. 

“He told me that the wife of an old Marine buddy had called to say that her husband had been badly injured in a car accident and might not make it. Charlie said that he was going to catch a plane to Boston and then rent a car to get to the island and probably wouldn't be back for a couple of days.” Nancy paused. “After that trip, everything changed. It took me a while to realize how profoundly. You reappeared in his life and offered him the presidency of ACN." Nancy smiled at Leona. “Not exactly an offer any journalist in his right mind would refuse.”

“Did you mind?” Leona asked quietly, wondering why she had never asked Charlie this question. All she had seen was that she had needed Charlie, needed him to grow ACN, and needed him to help raise Reese. A slight smile played on the fringes of her lips as she recalled Charlie’s and Reese’s constant bickering at their twice weekly lunches, and sitting through the meeting about hacking Mac’s phone knowing that Charlie would never have made good on his threat to report Reese’s activities to the U.S. Attorney’s office. She wondered who had been more disappointed in Reese’s conduct that day, she or Charlie.

Nancy thought for a long while before answering Leona’s question. “Yes,” she finally replied, “I minded when I thought that it might destroy my marriage and end our family. But I also believed Charlie when he said that he loved me. And, I knew he loved the girls.” She paused again. “I realized that you and Charlie had been in contact before, but if he took the job, you would be working together . . . again.” She turned to look out of the window. “Later, I came to see that his working here . . . with you . . . was a means of keeping our family together.” She looked down at her hands. “Both of our families, I suppose. But even before I understood that, I knew it would be cruel to put him to a choice. And, frankly, I'm not sure what he would have done . . . or if he had chosen me, whether he would have survived being separated from you again.” Nancy Skinner looked up again and into Leona’s eyes. “And, of course, there was Reese . . .”

"What made you think . . . suspect . . . ?”

Nancy smiled. “I'm tempted to say that I can spot Charlie Skinner’s children a mile away. They have all inherited certain of his mannerisms, you know. And, that was some of it. Also, Reese’s eyes . . . he has his father’s eyes. But then you surely know that.”

Leona swallowed the lump that was forming in her throat and took another sip of tea. When she didn't speak, Nancy continued. “It was many things, really. One night when Reese was in Business School and the girls and I were in Boston without Charlie, we took Reese out to dinner and somehow the conversation got around to Sophie’s getting a driver’s license, and then to all of the stupid things that young drivers do, and Reese started to talk about . . . “

“The motorcycle accident,” Leona finished for her. She closed her eyes and chuckled softly. “Oh, what tangled webs we weave . . . .”

“Yes,” Nancy replied. “The motorcycle accident . . . and how he'd nearly died . . . on Nantucket . . . and I realized that that he was talking about being injured at exactly the same time as Charlie's old war buddy’s car wreck.” Nancy echoed Leona’s ironic laugh. “I asked Reese if Charlie had come to see him at the hospital. He seemed surprised by the question and said that he didn't remember seeing him. But I couldn't shake the feeling that it was just too much of a coincidence. So, a few days after we got back, I confronted Charlie, and he told me that there hadn't been an old Marine buddy . . . that you had called him and asked him to come when Reese was in the hospital. He had no explanation for why you would do that. It was a difficult conversation.”

“I thought that I was losing my child. They were running out of blood,” Leona said softly. “AB negative.”

“Charlie’s blood type.”

“And Reese’s. I was desperate when I called Charlie. Terrified and desperate.” Leona looked imploringly at Nancy Skinner. This time, Nancy put down her own tea cup, then taking Leona’s out of her hand, she set it on the coffee table and embraced the trembling woman. 

“Lee, you don't have to apologize or explain. You had every right to want your son’s father with you . . . “

“No,” Leona interrupted, but she didn't pull away. “I had no right.”

Nancy squeezed her and let go. “Well, we disagree on that.” Leona just stared at her. “Lee,” Nancy said smiling, “Charlie’s feelings for you were written on his face every time he looked at you or at Reese. I'd have had to have raised emotional denial to an art form not to have come to terms with all of this years ago.” She paused. “I had a happy marriage to a kind, loving, good man. I have two beautiful daughters from him and two marvelous grandsons, and . . .” She paused again for emphasis. “. . . a stepson whom I deeply love.” She paused again, letting that sink in with Leona. “I finally came to the realization that I wasn't deprived. Honestly. It took me a little while, I'll admit, but I know now that I have so much in my life that I wouldn't have if Charlie hadn't come to ACN. Will reaching out to Beau. Reese taking care of Sophie. You.” Nancy nodded at Leona. “Finish your tea while I continue my tale of investigative journalism into Reese Lansing's parentage.” Leona obediently drank.

“So,” Nancy continued, a lighthearted tone in her voice. “After the whole Nantucket thing came out, I did a little Internet checking into Reese’s birth. The official spin was that he had been due in the beginning of February, and was a little early when he popped out on January third. He had weighed almost seven pounds which made me wonder about that, but Arthur was a large man so it was plausible that Reese was headed to be one of those ten pounders if he'd gone to term. The problem was that by the time I was considering this, it was apparent that Reese looks nothing like Arthur and nothing like Butthead, for that matter. So I did a little calculating and discovered that if he hadn't been early, or had been even a week or so late as first babies frequently are, that would put his conception back to March 1975, when . . . .”

“Charlie and I were in Saigon.”

Nancy nodded. "After that, I got confirmation by playing a trick on Charlie. You remember Sophie’s senior year in high school when she developed a little crush on Reese? Well, I acted like I thought it would be a great match, gushing all over Charlie about how cute they were together and wouldn't it be lovely if they fell in love.” She laughed and made a face at Leona. “I'm not usually that much of an airhead, nor do I feel like marriage, even to a budding billionaire, should be at the top of my daughter’s list of life goals. I think if Charlie hadn't been so freaked out at the idea of having to break up a romantic relationship between his daughter and her half-brother, he might have seen through me.” Nancy smiled, then snorted a laugh at the memory. “But he was totally freaked. I'll never forget the look in his eyes. Oh, he said things about my not encouraging Sophie because Reese was so much older,” Nancy recalled, shaking her head, “but the blind panic on his face told me everything I wanted to know.”

Nancy looked at Leona. “Are you going to tell Reese? I really think that you should.”

“I did,” Leona answered. “A few weeks before . . . before Charlie died.”

“Really? That’s wonderful!” Then, seeing the expression on Leona’s face, Nancy sobered. “They never had the chance to acknowledged it?”

Leona shook her head. “I swore Reese to absolute secrecy.”

“How did he take the news?”

“He’d been so upset about having to sell ACN to Pruit . . . so worried about Charlie, Will and Mac . . . angry at Blair and Randy . . . incensed at Arthur for leaving everything to them and setting it up so that they could put us through this hell . . . asking me how his own father could have done this to him . . . screaming at me for giving Arthur so much stock in the divorce. I couldn't take it anymore and I told him . . . answered all of his questions. Told him that his grandfather had negotiated the pre-nup with Arthur and that the stock was a bribe . . .” Leona sighed deeply. “The price of Arthur’s silence and complicity in the charade that would cover up the fact that I was pregnant with Charlie Skinner’s child when we married.”

Leona sat silently for a moment as though the act of saying those words aloud had shocked her. Then, she spoke in a low impassioned voice, “I don't know why I allowed myself to be bullied into it. Christ! It was 1975! I could have just had the baby on my own. I didn't need the cover of a husband.” Leona stopped herself. It was all water under the bridge, ancient history. She sighed deeply. “How did Reese take it?” she asked rhetorically, repeating Nancy’s question. “He said that finding out that he shared nothing with Arthur Lansing and the twins was the only good thing to come out of the whole fucking mess. He said that he knew that he couldn't tell anyone, but that he was proud to be Charlie’s son. Then, he asked me why after the divorce, Charlie had been friends with Arthur and Monica . . . .” Leona laughed at the memory of Reese’s face when he'd asked the question.

“I'd love to know the answer to that one myself,” Nancy interrupted. “I know that Charlie didn't much like either of them.”

“I asked Charlie to,” Leona replied. “I'd just been forced to give Arthur a frighteningly large interest in AWM, and I needed someone to keep an eye on him.”

Nancy nodded, and drained the last of her cup. “There’s another thing that I'd like to know,” she said.

“Certainly. Anything.”

"The clipping about Reese's birth . . . do you have any idea why Charlie wrote Reese's initials over and over?” Leona blinked, trying and failing to keep her turbulent emotions from being reflected in her face. “It's okay,” Nancy said hastily, seeing Leona’s discomfort.

“No! No! I'll tell you. When we were in Asia, and Charlie started to feel protective about me . . . there were times . . . well, you remember, it wasn't always easy being a female reporter . . . especially back in those days . . . anyway, we couldn't always go around joined at the hip, but if we recognized that there was a situation where I might need help, he would try to stay within earshot, and we developed a code that I could use if I needed him. It was . . . the letters, RNL. Charlie taught me to tap them out in Morse Code.” Leona put her hand on the table and tapped her fingers. Short, long, short . . . long, short . . . short, long, short, short. 

Nancy smiled a sympathetic smile and nodded. Mercifully, she did not ask why Lee and Charlie had selected those letters for their code, or why Leona had chosen them as her son’s initials, and so Leona was spared the pain of saying that they stood for “Right Now, Lover,” or revealing that she had chosen Reese’s name as a covert act of defiance against her father, and as a reminder that she would always need Charlie Skinner. Finally, Nancy spoke. “Would it be alright with you if I stop by to see Reese before I leave? I have some things of . . . Charlie’s . . . that I want him to have . . . and I'd like to give him . . . the letter . . . myself.”

"Of course.” The effort of keeping her voice controlled made Leona’s words come out in a whisper. 

“Okay.” Nancy cleared her throat, and her eyes shown brightly. “Let's go pay Mac a visit. Talk about morning sickness and exhaustion. That should cheer us up.”

 

Will walked briskly through the bull pen toward his office. “Jim,” he called out loudly, tapping on the glass door of Jim’s office, while trying not to look at the name plate, “MacKenzie McHale” that was still affixed to the partition by the door. How he could actually miss the woman he lived with, slept with, and who was only three floors away remained a mystery. “Please come to my office when you get a chance.” He'd just come from lunch with that woman, a completely unsatisfactory lunch during which each of his attempts to talk about the nightmare that she had experienced the night before was met with the same denial. All he could get from her were repeated statements that it “was nothing,” and that her cries and gasping breaths were not an indication that there was a problem. Bullshit!

“Hi, what’s up?” Jim asked, sticking his head into Will’s office. Will finished hanging up his jacket on his clothes tree, and turned around. “Jeez, you look tired,” Jim commented, keeping his voice deliberately light until he could figure out if it was a good tired or something was wrong. “Hair and Make-up is going to be on my ass.” Jim grinned, but Will didn't smile the way he usually did when the dark circles under his eyes had been caused by a night of making love to their boss. 

“Yeah.”

“Is everything okay?” Jim asked, sobering quickly.

“Yeah. Basically. I was thinking last night . . . or this morning, really . . . trying to remember what you said that time last week when you were reaming me a new one. You said something about me being clueless and the hardest time for her was . . . when did you say was hardest for her?”

“Summer.” 

“Summer.” Will repeated. “What would happen in the summer? Any particular time in summer?” He wanted to ask whether June 8th meant anything to Jim, but decided against asking a leading question that might trigger Jim’s tendency to obfuscate to protect Mac’s privacy.

Jim looked predictably uncomfortable. “Why? Why are you asking? What happened last night?”

“She had another nightmare.” It was the answer Jim was expecting.

“A bad one?”

“Christ, Jim, can there be a good nightmare?” Will scrubbed his hands over his weary face.

“Some are worse than others,” Jim said quietly, “but there is one thing that all of the ones that I've seen have in common . . . in all of them, she just wants Billy to be with her . . . to forgive her . . . to love her.” Jim closed his eyes and shook his head, and said softly, “God, if I could have turned into Billy . . . . but, Jesus, Will, you are Billy.” He looked at Will with compassion. “Just talk to her, tell her you’ve got her, tell her that you forgive her, show her that you love her.”

“I do . . . I did. She knows that I love her. She knows that I forgive her. Christ, she knows that I think . . . know . . . that there's nothing to forgive . . . that I understand what happened with Brian . . . that it was mostly my demons . . . that screwed us up. Why,” Will asked in an anguished voice, “is she dreaming that I don't? Why is she hurting herself like this?”

Because there’s more than just Brian, Jim answered silently in his head.

“We didn't break up in the summer,” Will continued. “It happened in March. Tell me what . . . why you said that the summers are the hardest time for her. Please,” Will pleaded when Jim hesitated. “Please help me understand.”

“Starting . . . in early June . . . she'd stop sleeping. She always had insomnia over there . . . we all did, really, because we'd get awakened so often during the night. But this was different. It was like she was afraid of something . . . afraid to go to sleep. And, it wasn't just at night . . . she'd drift off in the daytime . . . get lost in her thoughts . . . go away and leave us. Then, she'd . . . she was . . . It was like she was terrified of . . . her memories.” Will sat transfixed as Jim described how Mac would begin to shake and her breathing and her heartbeat would speed up. Just like the visit to his old apartment, just like she'd described her reaction to the picture of him with Nina in Page Six, he thought. He listened to Jim talk about how he would go up to her and touch her arm or just sit close to let her know that she wasn't alone. The words pierced Will. Jim, this kid, had been there for MacKenzie so she would not be alone, alone like he had left her . . . Jim wanted to make up for the fact that she'd been frozen out and condemned to exile by Billy. He wondered if Jim or God could ever forgive him.

She'd been that way in Islamabad. Jim had always felt that if it hadn't been summer, if she’d had more sleep, if she'd been less distracted, she would never have agreed to meet her erstwhile informant at the Shi’ite rally. Will’s face grew ashen, as he willed himself not to become physically ill. 

He listened while Jim described the things he'd learned to do to combat the nightmares, and the difficulty breathing and pounding of her heart that usually accompanied them. “You know she has a heart murmur, right?” Jim asked. “Mitral valve prolapse?”

Did he? Yes, he remembered something vaguely about some heart issue that ran in the McHale family. But Mac had said it was nothing serious. Now, after learning the truth about the stabbing, he wondered.

“When her heart starts beating that fast,” Jim continued, “you can really hear the valve slipping like a skipped beat. Scared the shit out of me the first few times it happened.”

Jim told Will how in desperation one night, he had picked up his guitar and begun to sing to MacKenzie, and how singing turned out to be something of a magic bullet to calm her and help her get through the panic. Hearing this almost undid him. Tears filled Will's eyes and he turned away from Jim, as a floodgate of long suppressed memories opened and he remembered how much Kenz had loved him to sing her to sleep in the old days. 

“Do you know what she dreams about? The nightmares, I mean. You must have noticed a pattern. I have, and you listened to her for years. She dreams about someone dying . . . I thought it was Charlie . . . but . . . did she dream about someone dying with you . . . over there?” Will scrubbed his hands over his face again. He looked exhausted. “I can't seem to figure it out . . . and she won't . . . .”

“Will,” Jim interrupted. “Will. Let's stop this for now.” Jim paused, but Will didn't look up, didn't make eye contact. “Will, you . . . I . . . we . . . have a show to do in a few hours. We need to pull ourselves together . . . .”

“How?” Will looked up, a terrible guilt evident on his face.

“By just doing it, I guess.” Jim took a deep breath. “By not letting her down, by remembering that if we screw up, Pruit lands on her with both feet and she doesn't deserve that.”

“Yeah,” Will nodded and tried for a smile. “Yeah. You’re a good guy, Jim . . . a really special friend. Thank you for everything you’ve done for her. I don't think I'd have her . . . “ Will swallowed, trying to finished the thought without breaking down. “I don't think I'd . . . if you hadn't been there. She wouldn't have come home . . . without you . . . not alive.”

 

"Jim, you can't go in there!” Millie exclaimed, jumping up from her desk chair.

“Yeah? Watch me,” Jim replied, pushing open Mac’s office door, and charging into the room, where he nearly collided with Lucas Pruit, who was standing with MacKenzie in the middle of her office. Pruit had his hand raised to accent the point he was making to ACN’s President, but Jim’s unexpected appearance seemed to stun him to silence.

Jim, no less surprised, let out a breath that sounded like a grunt, and stopped dead in his tracks.

“Lucas,” Mac said smoothly, “I believe you’ve met Jim Harper, the Executive Producer of News Night.” The unstated words, “the number one newscast on cable,” hung in the air.

“Uh . . . yes . . . well . . . good ratings, Harper. See that you and Will keep it up.”

“Thank you,” Jim said after a second’s recovery. “Sorry to barge in. I'm on a tight schedule and need a word with Mac.” MacKenzie noticed that he didn't offer to leave.

“Yes. Fine. She and I were about finished.” Pruit turned his attention back to MacKenzie. “Okay, then. We’ll keep doing it your way for a few more weeks and see how things shake out.”

“Fine,” Mac managed to say despite her shock. “We’ll reevaluate the situation in a couple of weeks,” she added graciously, after a mental kick from the Ambassador, who had impressed upon her the utility of always restoring the dignity of your opponent at the end of an exchange. This capitulation was the last thing she'd expected from Pruit, considering that they had just gone ten rounds with no decision. Pruit smiled and nodded at her, and cocking a finger at Jim in what Mac assumed he thought of as a macho guy gesture, departed.

“I was going to chew you out for pushing your way in here,” she said to Jim, “but now, I think I'll kiss you instead. I'd expected to get ordered to insist that Don and Elliott stay away from hard news and make Right Now more of a ‘human interest’ show,” Mac said, miming quotation marks in the air. “So, what's the big emergency?”

“Will.”

“I thought you guys were getting along better,” Mac sighed. “What's he done this time?”

“Nothing. I'm worried. Mac, you've got to talk to him. I've just spent the better part of an hour with him, trying to put him back together enough to do the show tonight.” Concern furrowed MacKenzie’s brow, but she didn't try to interrupt. Jim was on a roll. What's more, she realized, she'd only ever seen this degree of fierce protectiveness from Jim when it was about her, or Maggie. Now it was for Will. The wonders probably would never cease. “He's turning himself inside out because you’re having nightmares again. You’ve got to tell him . . . Christ, he's so distracted, he's going to screw up on air!”

MacKenzie froze. Jim and Will had been talking about her nightmares. She had no idea what to say. All she knew was that she didn't want to have this conversation . . . she couldn't have this conversation. “Tell him what?” she asked in her Lady MacKenzie voice, wondering if Jim could hear it wavering. “There's nothing to tell.”

“Cut the crap, Mac! I don't have time for this! Did you hear what I said? You’re going to worry him into a heart attack or stroke! And, I'm not stupid. I listened for three years to you talking and screaming in your sleep for days and weeks on end. You say the same shit over and over. He's one of the smartest guys I know. He's going to figure it out if he lives that long. I have a pretty good idea . . . .” The expression of horror on MacKenzie’s face stopped Jim in mid-rant. 

“I . . . I . . . can't . . . I . . . just can't.” She began to shake, as her eyes filled with tears and her lips trembled. “Go,” she said weakly, “go . . . you should . . . go.”

Of course, he didn't go.

“Jesus, Mac.” Jim took two steps toward her, and ignoring the hand she raised in protest, put his arms around her the way he had done hundreds of times before. “Jesus, Mac,” he repeated as her head fell to his shoulder and she began to cry. He stroked her hair. “Shush, Mac. It’ll be okay. Really. Trust me. He won't be . . . .” Jim stopped himself. Will wouldn't be what? Angry? Upset? He was already upset. Jim regrouped. “Mac,” he said, pulling back to look at her. God! She looked so miserable. “Mac, there is nothing . . . nothing . . . that you could do . . . could have done . . . that Will won't forgive.” He tried to give her a reassuring smile. “I truly believe that, and coming from me, that says a lot. I haven't exactly been his biggest fan.”

Mac tried to nod, but as she moved her head, what little color she still had in her face drained away, her eyes grew wide, and her hand came up to her mouth. Jim had seen Mac overcome by nausea frequently enough that he instantly began moving toward the bathroom that adjoined her office without letting go. “I can . . . You don't . . . .” she started to say, but again Jim ignored her, crossing the threshold door with her and moving the small rug on the bathroom floor with his foot to position it in front of the toilet. Then, he lowered MacKenzie to the floor and as she turned toward the bowl, he gathered up her hair . . . so much longer than he'd ever known it before . . . and held it behind her neck as she retched. 

“So much for morning sickness being confined to the morning,” she said when she was finished giving up her lunch. She accepted the cool wet washcloth that he handed her and the glass of water. He sat back down beside her on the floor.

“Little sips,” Jim cautioned, wondering whether they would return to the subject of talking to Will about her dreams. “You could sure use a better rug in here,” he said, looking at the postage-stamp sized floor covering on which she was sitting. “I guess Charlie didn't spend much time sitting on the floor.”

“No, I imagine not.”

“Feeling better?”

“Yeah,” she answered with an audible sigh. Then, looking at her watch, MacKenzie added, “you’d better get going or you’re going to miss the final rundown.”

He looked at his own watch and recoiled in shock. “Whoa! Okay. Time flies when you’re having fun.” She smiled at him. She looked stronger. He decided to re-open the can of worms, and be more direct about his suspicions than he had ever been. “Mac, I meant what I said. You need to . . . I know Will has some conservative views, but really, he won't condemn you for anything you did in the aftermath of the break-up. He's really in touch with how much of what happened was him and not you.” Impulsively, he kissed her cheek and left.

Mac was so busy marveling at the sea change in Jim’s and Will’s relationship that had to have occurred for him to speak with so much conviction about Will’s thoughts and feelings, that it took several minutes for the assumption underlying Jim’s statement to clarify itself in her mind. She needed to correct him. But for that to happen, she needed to tell it all to Will. Say things she had never told another living soul.

She busied herself until 8:00, catching up on evaluations of the staff she had inherited from Charlie and eating the high-protein, low-carb dinner that Millie brought to her before leaving for the day. Picking up the remote control, she activated the monitor opposite her desk and watched as the News Night logo appeared. As it frequently still did, her heart leapt when Will’s face came on the screen. He did look tired, but, oh so beautiful. How many times, she wondered, had she sat in the desert dust and searched for a feeble signal that would allow her to launch ACN and see him again . . . hear his voice again . . . touch her hand to his cheek on the screen?

She felt a fluttering sensation deep inside her abdomen when Will began to welcome her to the July 23, 2013, edition of News Night. Almost by reflex she pressed her hand to her body and felt it again. Could it be? It was so early. But . . . it felt eerily familiar. Oh, God! Her eyes filled with tears. Joy and pain mixed together until she thought her chest would burst. What was she going to do? Suddenly, she felt lost, unmoored from reality. No! She wasn't going to crumble. She needed to think. Mac deliberately slowed her breathing by taking the cleansing breaths she'd been taught by her yoga instructor. In through her mouth, hold, and exhale through her nose. The fluttering sensation returned, stronger this time, and there was no mistaking it. The tears in her eyes spilled down her cheeks as she knew what she needed to do. She muted the television and picked up her phone. 

She realized that it was late, or rather, early to be calling London, but she couldn't stop herself. One in the morning. There was, she surmised, a good chance that her mother had gone to bed and the Ambassador was still awake in his study. She pressed the button to ring his mobile phone.

“McHale here.” The sound of her father’s voice cost Mac the last of her self control.

“Daddy,” she whispered, her voice thick with tears.

“Cat?” No answer. “Greer?” Ted McHale tried the names of the two of his children whom he knew were going through a bit of a rough patch and might call him crying in the wee hours of the night.

“No.”

“Mackie? My God, Mackie! What’s happened? Is Will alright? Has something happened to Will?”

“No. He's . . . fine. It's me.”

“The baby?” She could feel the fear that he was fighting to keep out of his voice.

“No. No. I'm sorry to worry you. The baby’s fine. I felt it move tonight. I think . . . .” He could hear a sob catch in her throat. Was that the reason for this call? Heaven knew that he'd had enough experience with pregnant women, or at least with one particular woman’s multiple pregnancies, to know that emotions could be both intense and unpredictable, but he couldn't escape the feeling that something was very wrong with his eldest daughter. 

“Okay, sweetheart, just take a deep breath. Take your time. I'm here and I'm not going anywhere. Do you want to get on Skype?” He hoped she’d agree. He wanted to get a look at her. 

“No,” she said. “I don't think I can do this on Skype. Just voices.”

“Do what, Mackie?”

"Tell you what I have to say.”

“Okay. Whatever you want, darling.” He paused. He wished again that he could see her face. In his years as a diplomat, Sir Edward McHale had discovered that he frequently could learn more from watching expressions than listening to words. It was a skill that he'd practiced and honed. 

When after a few moments, his daughter still said nothing, he spoke gently, “I'm listening.” He heard her take a breath.

“I . . . I’ve been having nightmares. Will wants to know . . . why . . . what they’re about.” Her voice was thin, childlike and wavering. Ted wanted to say something, ask that question himself, but his instinct, sharpened by decades in Britain’s diplomatic service and as Margaret McHale’s husband told him that this was one of those times when, as he'd put it to Will, it was best to just take his hand from the tiller and allow his boat to be pulled along in Mackie’s wake. So, exercising great self-control, he didn't speak.

“I don't . . . I can't . . . seem to tell him . . . bring myself to tell him.” Mac stopped speaking, as if lost in her own thoughts.

When the silence continued, her father spoke gently, “Why do you think you are having these bad dreams, Mackie?”

The answer was so soft it was almost inaudible. “Guilt.” Once again the silence dragged on between them. Then, MacKenzie spoke again. “I . . . I was . . . pregnant once before.” Ted hoped that she hadn't heard his surprised intake of breath. He wanted to ask when and by whom, but he didn't trust his voice, and also knew that it would be the wrong thing to do. Haltingly, she answered his unspoken question. “It was . . . in two thousand and seven . . . early two thousand seven.”

Training and instinct aside, he could not stop the words from coming out of his mouth. “Oh, Mackie! Sweet girl, is that what you told Will? Is that what caused him . . ?”

“No, I never got the chance,” she interrupted. “I told him about Brian . . . that's why I told him about Brian . . . but then, he wouldn't listen to anything else.”

Again, Ted couldn't stop his words, “but wasn't that the same thing . . . the pregnancy and Brian?”

Suddenly, they were both confused and tongue-tied.

“Wha . . ?”

“Uh?”

"I . . . "

“I . . .”

“Oh.” MacKenzie recovered first. “Oh! No! You think . . . . No . . . no, Daddy, I hadn't seen Brian for over a year when Will and I broke up . . . but I guess you never knew that . . . “ she finished softly. No, he hadn't, and it was something to absorb. “I never was . . . I never would have been careless or sloppy about contraception with Brian.” He found the note of indignation that crept into her voice strangely reassuring. His Mackie was still in there somewhere. 

“No. No, of course not,” he said. Only with William. Of course, only with William.

“It was . . .” she continued, her voice dropping once again to little more than a whisper, “the baby . . . was Billy’s.”

The dreams were caused by guilt, she'd said. Sir Edward McHale closed his eyes, thankful for the first time that they were not on Skype. He felt sure that he knew what was coming and wondered how his son-in-law would handle learning that Mackie’d had an abortion after Will cut her off. Ted had had two conversations with Will that had touched on the break-up, and knew that Will harbored intense feelings of guilt about his behavior. The first had been at Christmas when they were together, and the second only a few days earlier when Will had called to say that he'd spoken to Jim Harper about Mac’s stabbing and the events at Landstuhl. They had both wept, and Ted had assured Will that he believed that had he called, Will would have come to Germany. Will was obviously tearing himself up about his reaction to Mac’s disclosure that she'd briefly gone back to Brian, about freezing MacKenzie out of his life, and about “sending” her into harm’s way, where she had almost been killed. Ted had tried to comfort him, and finally thought he'd succeeded to some degree when he'd told Will that he thought things had worked out as they should have, that if Will had come to Landstuhl and taken Mackie back there, she'd have always wondered if it was only out of pity because she was injured. Ted had said what he honestly believed – that Charlie Skinner had been right, and the way for Will and Mac to reunite was by first doing the news together. 

“What happened?” he asked his daughter gently, trying to get the conversation moving again.

“I couldn't . . . didn't . . . take care of myself properly. I didn't eat or sleep, really. I got . . . I didn’t gain weight like I should have done.” She paused as if she had run out of energy. Her father waited for her to continue. “I lost the baby.”

Ted McHale felt relief wash over him. This would be painful, but easier for Will to accept, he thought. Flashes of MacKenzie, emaciated and pale, visiting home before going on to Afghanistan jumped into his mind. That must have been shortly after the miscarriage, he thought. Then, he spoke. "Mackie, are you concerned that Will will be angry or hurt?"

“Both, I suppose. But, more hurt, I think.”

“Yes,” Ted’s voice held the comforting, gentle tone Mac remembered from childhood illnesses. “I think there is little you can do about that. But from what you say, he's being hurt by not knowing what's happening to you now. You need to talk to him.”

“Yes, I know. But . . . how?”

“Like you just did it with me. Just start.”

“Yes. Okay.”

“Mackie? Do you want me to not tell your mother about the miscarriage?” 

The word, miscarriage, brought to her mind disjointed images from the nightmare – pain and gushing blood and a tiny, tiny newborn moving weakly in her hands. But, she thought there was no need for her parents to know all of that, or ever realize that she had been pregnant when she had visited them in May of 2007. “No. It's fine. I won't ask you to keep a secret from Mum.”

“Alright.” She could hear his relief. 

“Dad, I need to go. Will’s off the air and he'll be here any minute.”

“Alright. Give him my love. And, Mackie, remember that William loves you almost as much as I do.”

He heard her soft chuckle. “I know. You two are the best men I've ever known. The best there could ever be.”

As she disconnected the call, MacKenzie resolved to tell Will everything when they got home.


	4. Quickening

But she didn't tell him as soon as they got home. Looking back on it later, Mac would count that night as the first time she’d had her plans majorly derailed and rearranged by Miss Charlotte Elizabeth Morgan McAvoy. Daddy's little butterfly.

After recovering a moment from the telephone call with her father, MacKenzie went into the bathroom, splashed cold water on her face and reapplied a bit of make-up – not much, but enough -- too much and Will would be suspicious. Looking in the mirror, she felt satisfied that she had concealed most of the effects of the tears she’d shed before and during her conversation with her father. She felt a wave of guilt about the call pass through her. She had never intended telling the Ambassador about the pregnancy before Will, but she had felt herself unraveling and knew that she had to find a way to stop it before Will finished the show and walked in and found her. She had always been able to hang onto her father’s voice in a crisis, and since returning from the Middle East had many a time used a conversation with him about politics or world events to pull herself back from the edge. All her life, she'd gained strength from his gentle, logical way of looking at things. It was the lesser of two evils, she told herself. Better to have told her father than have Will walk in on a full-scale PTSD meltdown. And, it was only a matter of hours until Will would know everything as well.

He came to collect her, freshly showered in one of his blue sweaters, saying that they had been invited to go to Hang Chews “with the gang.” Mac begged off and told him she was tired and just wanted to go home. That was fine with him. “I'm not the party animal in this family,” Will said.

“Didn't used to be. Then, I got nailed to the wagon.”

"Hey, that's a good one. I'll bet the Ambassador would award 20 points for that one,” Will McAvoy grinned in that boyish way Mac had always loved, “ . . . ‘I got nailed,’ as in . . . you know . . . a play on the instrumentality by which you’ve been forced to give up drinking . . . and, ‘nailed to the wagon,’ as in it will be a long time before you can fall off again.”

“Thank you, professor, that was very elucidating. Next week, we’ll be doing a passage from Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying.’” Mac kissed her husband. It was supposed to be a chaste office brush-by, but he caught her and deepened the kiss until she was gasping and opening an eye to be sure that there was no one on the other side of the glass.

“Um, yes,” he said. “Let's go home.”

She was quiet for most of the ride. That was okay with Will, who kept their hands locked together, fingers intertwined. MacKenzie didn't appear sad, he observed, just contemplative and focused, almost as if she were putting together a show in her head. 

In a way, she was. She was planning the evening, producing exactly the way she was going to introduce and cover the subject of her previous pregnancy. She would keep it factual and brief. Focus on being receptive and supportive whatever Will’s reaction would be. He didn't need a lot of detail . . . just that she had become pregnant when they'd gotten sloppy about birth control right after getting back from the Holidays in 2007. Mac beat down the recollection of how insanely happy they’d been during that time . . . contained the stab of pain she felt for what was to come . . . neutralized the feelings that threatened to flood her mind until she managed to force herself back into production mode. She would say that she simply never had the chance to tell him before she lost the baby. And after that . . . after that, I ran from you, Billy, ran to a living Hell on the other side of the world . . . after that, I couldn't face you . . . . No, stop, she told herself. She would say that after losing the baby, making the disclosure of its existence to him lost its urgency. But she would tell Will . . . make sure he knew . . . believed . . . that it was something that she'd always intended to tell him. She'd sworn an oath to . . . . MacKenzie turned her mind forcibly away from that thought, even as she felt the blood pound in her ears. She fought for control, keeping her body as still as she was able. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Okay . . . her heart was slowing down . . . it was okay. She glanced over to where her husband was sitting beside her. Will didn't seem to have noticed her slipping over the edge.

Just then, MacKenzie was jolted by the buzz of her cell phone. She jumped, as her heart skipped a beat and her breath caught. Embarrassed, she smiled up at her husband while fishing in her jacket pocket for the offending device. “Crap! Forgot to silence the text alert,” she said apologetically. 

“Didn't bother me, but you were really off someplace far away there.” He said it lightly, but Jim Harper’s words about Mac in Summer began replaying in his mind. 

She tapped the device a couple of times and he heard her chuckle, and then say in the kind of almost cooing voice that one might use about a puppy, “aw, he's so happy. Look.” She held up the screen for Will. It was a photograph of four young men in jeans and shirtsleeves, mugging for the camera holding champagne and displaying unlit cigars. One was Mac’s younger brother, Tommy, standing with the world’s most famous new father, and two others whom Will didn't recognize. Taking back the phone, Mac looked at the screen again and said, “Tommy says it's going to be George, but the bookies are still taking bets, so obviously that can't leave this car.” Although Mac said this in a matter-of-fact tone, she glanced up to be sure that the privacy screen in AWM 3 was fully engaged. 

Will shook his head in the “Toto, I don't think we’re in Kansas anymore” gesture he reserved for interactions with the McHale family. “What do you think when you look at this picture?” he asked.

She studied it again. “You, actually,” Mac replied. “I can see you next February, celebrating with the guys, yucking it up with champagne and cigars. You and Don, Jim, Reese and Neal.”

Yes, so could he. Maybe that's what made the picture so surreal. Just texting big sis a cell phone snap of little brother celebrating the birth of a friend’s son. Except that this particular selfie would be worth about a million dollars in the entertainment news market. Then, Will had a thought that caused him to laugh heartily and hold up his hands defensively. “Don't get your knickers in a twist, but I've just got to say this . . . what do you think Lucas Pruit would do if he knew that you, the President of ACN, home of “Celebrity Update,” had that photo on your phone?”

MacKenzie’s smile quickly morphed into a grimace of horror as the ramifications of the question sunk in. “Oh, God, Will. This phone is connected to the ACN network! Do you really think he can monitor my calls and texts?”

“No. No. Sweetheart, I was just kidding. I didn't mean to upset you.”

“Should I delete the picture? If this leaked somehow, Tommy would kill me. Daddy would be livid. The Duke’s . . . Will’s . . . friends are very protective of his privacy.” 

“I don't know. Maybe. It couldn't hurt to delete it. I don't think Charlie or Leona had any kind of surveillance in place and I doubt Pruit’s had time to think about monitoring your phone. I really believe you’re safe.”

“What about hacking? You don't think someone could hack my phone, do you?”

They just stared at each other, letting the question hang in the air. Then, he gave her his best “well, duh” expression, and they dissolved into giggles, as she deleted the picture.

They were giggling still when the car pulled up to their building. Will pulled her to him tightly and kissed her passionately on the elevator ride to their floor. In an uncharacteristically brazen move in public, if the elevator that they shared with the building’s other residents could be considered public, MacKenzie reached between them and stroked him with her palm. The elevator door opened onto their little lobby and they stepped out never breaking the kiss. As he grew to fill her hand, she half expected him to drag her to the bedroom as soon as the security pad unlocked the apartment door. But, once inside, Will pulled back, a twinkle in his eye. 

“Is this the start of that second trimester thing everybody’s always talking about?” She smiled coyly. “Well, hold that thought.” He kissed her lightly. “But right now, I'm going to fix us food. You need to eat.” When she rolled her eyes, he continued, “Scoff all you like. But have I told you that in addition to being Director of Morale, I've also been appointed Director of Nutrition?”

“Is that so?”

“Absolutely. So, slip into something more comfortable and meet me in the kitchen.”

He prepared penne pasta with chicken breast and pesto. They sat at the kitchen counter, eating and debriefing that evening’s show.

They lapsed into a companionable silence, and Will had the realization that he’d never found silence comfortable with anyone but MacKenzie. But then, he'd never really been comfortable with anyone but Mac, except maybe Charlie. “I miss you,” he said. “During the day, I mean. And, during the show. It's you I want . . . in my ear, telling me what to do and what to watch out for. Jim’s great, don't get me wrong, but I want you . . . right there, not three floors away.”

“You have no idea how lonely it is for me,” she said softly. “If I didn't think that my doing this job was the only way to preserve Charlie’s broadcasting legacy, I'd stop tomorrow, and . . . “ she smiled at him, “ask you for my old job back. I love you, Billy. You can't imagine how much. I never thought I'd love anyone this completely, this totally, until I met you.”

Now. Now was the time to begin, she told herself. Just begin. Talk to him. She drew herself up. “Will, you’ve wanted to know . . . “ she started to say. And then, she felt it again, the flutter in her lower abdomen. It was stronger this time and unmistakable. “Ah . . . ah,” she made two breathy, slightly grunting sounds, as both of her hands went involuntarily to her belly, and all of her focus turned inward. There was no doubt about it this time. She was feeling the fetus move. A long buried memory surfaced of asking her grandfather what the word, “quick” meant in the Anglican liturgy where the priest says “the quick and the dead.” “Do the slow people die?” six-year-old Mackie had asked the old Earl. When he'd stopped laughing, the old man had patiently explained that “quick” was an old-fashioned way of saying “alive” or “living,” and that when women have babies in their tummies (“like Mummy,” she'd interrupted), there was a moment when they felt their babies move for the first time, and this moment was called “quickening.”

"Mac!” Will was on his feet, then dropping to his knees beside her, his face a mask of fear. “What is it? What's wrong? Kenz? Are you okay?”

“Yes. Yes.” She looked up into his eyes and tried to smile, but her lips trembled, and her tears fell. She reached for him and he wrapped his arms around her. “Billy,” she whispered, “ I felt the baby . . . moving. It's quickened. Isn't that the most beautiful old word?”

“You felt it?” Will asked in amazement. Tentatively, he put his had on the little bulge that had appeared a few weeks before and was now wrecking havoc with Mac’s ability to button and zip the pencil skirts that she continued to insist upon wearing to the office. 

“I don't think that you will be able to feel it yet,” she said in response to his gesture. “It's very slight and deep down. Just a tiny flutter. It's like I have a butterfly inside.” 

Will inclined his head and placed a tender kiss on his wife’s body next to the place his hand rested. “How's my little butterfly?” he asked. And thus, the person they would later name Charlotte became her daddy’s little butterfly, or sometimes just “Butterfly” to her parents. 

When Will looked up again, Mac knew that she wouldn't tell him that night, that she could not . . . would not . . . do anything that would shatter the joy suffusing his face. She loved it that he took such pleasure at the thought that their baby was growing and moving inside of her. This was the Billy she had dreamt of before . . . when she was alone and desperately trying to get him to listen to her. No, she wouldn't tell him tonight. This night would belong to the baby inside of her, the one that they would raise and love and to whom they would give their lives. There would be another time, she decided, to talk about the chance they had missed . . . the chance she had squandered . . . but not right now. Not tonight. She knew that shortly, the few uneaten bites of food on their plates forgotten, he would stand and take her into his arms and walk her to their bed.

 

The dream took her suddenly and violently. First, she felt the heat, the dusty, cloying heat that the feeble room air conditioner could never defeat. Then, came the ripping sensation inside of her. She screamed. Billy! Billy! Where was Billy? She remembered. He was gone. Gone. Gone from her life. She had lost him and now she was losing . . . everything else. 

Will had tried using every technique he could think of to wake her and comfort her, and it was only when he finally broke down crying in frustration and fear, that he picked up his cell phone from beside the bed and called Jim Harper.

“Jim . . . ah, it's . . . .” Jim recognized Will’s voice, thick with tears, without the aid of caller ID.

“I can hear her, Will.”

“I've tried everything . . . she's in so deep . . . her heart’s beating so fast . . . I'm scared.”

“Okay. It will be okay, Will. Take a deep breath. Can you hold her?”

“Not really. She fights me off. She wants to curl on her side. It's like she's in pain. Is it the knife wound? Is she dreaming about being stabbed?”

Jim didn't answer the questions. Instead, he said, “then don't try to hold her. Just wrap yourself around her. Rub her back. That sometimes calms her down.”

Will did as Jim suggested. Jim could hear him making soothing sounds and telling Mac that he loved her and forgave her and that everything would be alright. Then, just when he thought that things were quieting down, he heard Will gasp.

“God! Jim, there's blood!”

“Blood where?” 

"On the pillow! Christ! Her nose is bleeding!”

Maggie, who had been awakened by the conversation sat bold upright in bed, a look of panic on her face. “Mac’s bleeding?” she asked. “The baby? What's going on?”

Jim shook his head at Maggie and tapped his nose with his right index finger. Then, he said to Will, “She's had nosebleeds like this before. Stay calm. Get a towel and make sure she’s on her side so she doesn't choke. Squeeze the bridge of her nose. She usually wakes up if her nose starts to bleed. I'll stay on the line.” Jim heard Will moving around and then talking softly to MacKenzie. A few minutes later, he heard Mac coughing and gagging, and when Will started to tell her that she was fine, and that the blood on the sheets didn't matter, Jim quietly disconnected and lay back down, breathing slowly as the adrenaline coursing through his body slowly dissipated. 

When her nose stopped bleeding, Will helped Mac wash the blood from her face, threw the towel and pillow onto the floor, and took her into his arms. “Kenz, you’re frightening me. We need to do something . . . We need . . . do you want to talk to someone? It doesn't have to be me, but . . . please . . . “ He kissed her forehead, and pushed strands of her hair, still wet from where he'd washed off the blood, away from her face. “We . . . I can't go on like this much longer.” 

“I'm so sorry, Billy. You won't have to, I promise. I'm going to tell you . . . everything. And, I'll get a referral . . . you can ask Dr. Habib, can't you? I’ve never had much success with therapy, but I'll try . . . I don't want to hurt you. I'm not doing this to hurt you.”

“I know that. Of course, I know that.”

“I’m so tired, Billy.” Mac sighed deeply. “I think that maybe if you hold me, I can go back to sleep. Okay?” She looked up at him, in the dim glow of the nightlight, imploring him not to press her to tell him now.

"Of course,” he replied, kissing her lightly on the lips. “Let's both get some sleep.”

He did more than hold her, and the lovemaking seemed to work its magic for MacKenzie. Will lay still, listening to her even breathing as she drifted into slumber. But as exhausted and drained as he felt, he could not sleep. There was a pattern here, a big picture that was eluding him, a jigsaw puzzle with all of the pieces on the table in front of him if he could only match them up and fit them together. The nightmares. June 8th 2007. England. Afghanistan. He simply couldn't escape the feeling that they were linked somehow. After his conversation with Darius Walker, he had almost called Mac’s father, and asked him to recall whether she had been in England in early June, and if, so, what had happened. The Ambassador was surprisingly approachable considering the bizarre world in which he and his family lived. Will’s lips turned up in a small smile as his thoughts went to the car ride home and Mac’s horror that she could be the source if Tommy’s picture with Prince William leaked to the public, and how they’d made real progress, managing to laugh over the usually painful subject of her hacked phone and the destroyed voice message.

Then, suddenly, he was jolted fully awake by the realization that there was one place . . . such an obvious . . . fucking obvious place . . . to which he hadn't turned for the key to the significance of June 8, 2007. It was Mac’s voicemails and emails to him immediately after the break up. Un-listened to and unread, they were all meticulously preserved and organized on his laptop. Carefully, he disentangled himself from his wife, and pulling on the sweats and t-shirt he had hastily discarded on the floor, Will went out to find his computer and a pair of earbuds. He left the door open, hoping that if Kenz needed him again, he would be able to hear.

Dawn broke over New York City, but Will hardly noticed. He had started with the emails, figuring that reading would be less painful, less immediate than hearing his wife’s voice. He'd been right. He'd gotten through the emails pretty much intact. And, they had given him a key piece of information – that Mac had left the UK for Afghanistan weeks earlier than necessary, on June 5th. There had been one from Kabul on the 6th, saying she'd arrived and checked into the Intercontinental and giving him the number of the hotel landline in case he decided to act on her invitation to listen to her and her sat phone couldn't get a signal. Then nothing more. No emails for over a year. He closed his eyes. This was torture, not being able to hit reply and undo the past, undo the damage, take away the scar . . . the scars . . . he'd caused.

Will opened the folder containing the audio files, launched the app and began to listen. The first time he'd heard MacKenzie choke on her tears, his compose shattered, and his own tears began to fall. Now, almost two hours into the process, he was listening intently for a third time to the six voicemail messages that she had left on June 7, 2007, trying to control the urge to scream in pain, trying to make himself understand what she'd done. There had been no messages on June 8th and none thereafter for more than a year.

As she surfaced from sleep, MacKenzie felt cold. That was strange because she almost always awoke to a feeling of warmth, courtesy of her own personal, tall, blond bed warmer. Languidly, she moved a leg, expecting to find him there, but as she extended it the full width of the bed, the realization dawned that she was alone. She squinted at the pale light coming through the windows over which, in their haste to get at each other the night before, neither had closed the drapes. Will was up early. He'd been sleeping better, and she hoped that his being up at dawn didn't signal a relapse of his post-incarceration insomnia. 

Then, she heard a sound from down the hall. At first, it sounded like an animal, but they had no pets. Then, it clarified as she came fully awake. Someone was crying. No, Will was sobbing. MacKenzie sighed, as a jolt of fresh grief coursed through her body. Sometimes, she thought they would both mourn Charlie Skinner for the rest of their lives. 

Pulling the blue cashmere robe that Will loved from its hook in the bathroom, she walked out into the hallway toward the dinning room. He didn’t seem to see or hear her approach, and as she got closer, she realized that this was due at least in part to the ear buds protruding from her husband’s ears. Not wanting to startle him, she moved slowly to stand by his chair. When he looked up at her, she gasped. He'd been crying for hours, she thought, judging from his swollen, red-rimmed eyes and blotchy skin. 

“Billy . . . Billy,” she whispered softly, as he hit a key on the laptop in front of him and turned toward her. She reached out and touched his shoulder, and he seemed to flinch under her hand.

“Kenz . . . Oh god, Kenz . . . I'm . . . I . . .” he stuttered, “Kenz . . . dear God, Kenz . . . Sweetheart, what did you do . . . did you take pills?” 

“What? What pills?” She shook her head in confusion. “Billy, I'm pregnant . . . I haven't had so much as an aspirin since May. What pills?”

In the way that is unique to small children and emotionally distraught adults, he abruptly changed subjects. “Kenz, what did . . . what did Charlie say . . . that made you . . . willing to come back to me?”

MacKenzie paused for a moment, instantaneously replaying the conversation in the Atlanta bowling alley in her mind. “He reminded me that I'm at my best only when I'm with you . . . and, although he didn't say it, that I'd never heal if I didn't come back and try again.” She moved her hand up to cup her husband’s face. “He told me that I was the one thing in this world that you cared about . . . and that if I'd listen, and keep my wrist straight, he'd come . . .” Her voice broke. “. . . to take me home.” 

Will nodded, as if this answer explained something to him. “Kenz,” he took a shaky breath, “sweetheart, the piece that Nina was going to publish . . . the thing you didn't want me to bribe her about . . . it was . . .” He watched bafflement claim her face, bafflement and the hurt that always leapt into her eyes at the mention of Nina Howard. “It was,” Will repeated, now speaking more rapidly, “that you’d attempted suicide . . . in the Middle East.” He didn't mention that according to Nina, it was supposedly in a way that put her crew in danger as well. That couldn't be true. MacKenzie had been alone when she made those calls. Of that, he was certain. His eyes darted involuntarily to the computer screen and hers followed.

She saw that the open folder on the desk top contained audio files, that it was named “June 2007,” and that it contained about a dozen files, six dated 7-7-07. . . . Her eyesight blurred, as her breathing stopped, and her pulse pounded in her ears. She sank slowly to the floor, her hands falling from his shoulders to his thigh. 

“Oh, God. Billy . . . you’ve heard them. Jesus, Billy. I . . . you . . . It's not what you’re thinking. There were no . . . It wasn't pills . . . .”

“What then? What, Kenz? What . . . happened?”

“’l’ll tell you . . . I will . . . I swear.” She looked at his heartbroken, swollen face, and decided that there weren't enough drugs or ice packs in the world to get Will ready to do News Night in fourteen hours, probably not even now, but certainly not after she told him what he'd actually been listening to. She kissed him gently. “We need to go to the sofa or back to bed, someplace comfortable and where you can hold me while I talk, but first, I need to use your phone.” She gestured to where it lay beside his computer. Numbly, he handed it to her.

Mac sat on the floor and called up Will’s Favorites list. Seeing Jim’s number, as she'd expected, she tapped to initiate the call. A few seconds later, she heard him answer.

“Jim, sorry to wake you . . . .”

“Mac! Jesus! How are you?” There was something in his tone that made her feel that there was more behind his surprise and question than being contacted at 6:00 AM. 

“I'm . . . .” She stopped herself from saying “fine” as a rote response. “I'm . . . about to talk to Will . . . .”

“Oh,” he interrupted. “Okay . . . well . . . um . . . uh . . . .”

“Jim, we need today.”

“Yeah,” he agreed softly.

“Will you alert Sloan and have her cover the show tonight? Bribe her with 5 minutes of the economic news of her choice.”

Jim chuckled appreciatively. “Sure.” He paused. “Mac?”

“Yes?”

“Everything will be fine.”

“Thanks.” It was barely more than a whisper. And then, she was gone.

“If you hurt her, Will McAvoy,” Jim mumbled to himself, “I will personally cut your fucking nuts off.”


	5. Messages

So this was it. Not exactly what she’d had planned.

“Billy, would you get us some tea? I'd like to listen to the messages from June.” MacKenzie looked up at her husband and smiled the best smile she could muster under the circumstances. He nodded mutely. They both stood up and he went into the kitchen while she sat down in the chair he'd vacated. He was so out of it that he'd not even asked her about her conversation with Jim, she observed, feeling slightly alarmed, or acknowledged that she had taken him off the show that night. She put in the earbuds and opened the audio file with the earliest time stamp. 

Will stood in the kitchen, waiting for the English electric tea kettle Margaret McHale had given them for Christmas to announce that the water inside was boiling. He thought that Mac should eat something, but felt too disoriented and fragile to cook, so he grabbed two high-protein, fiber-rich bars from a drawer and took one of her prenatal vitamins out of the bottle. He could hear Mac’s breath suck in and a soft moan escape her lips as she listened to the voice messages she had left for him six years before. 

He returned to the dining room and put a cup of herbal tea, a small glass of water, the vitamin pill and protein bar in front of his wife. She dutifully swallowed the vitamin and took a bite of the energy bar.

"Tell me,” he said without preamble, “tell me what was happening to you when you left me those messages.”

“But that's the end. You want me to start at the end?”

The end of what, he asked himself. “Yes. I guess I do.”

Okay, she thought, okay, I’ll do as he asks, but how? Say, “I was in labor” or “I was hemorrhaging and thought I was dying?” Neither sounded like a good option. She felt her throat go dry and swallowed several times to relieve the feeling. Her pulse began to speed up and she pressed her upper arm against her left side and felt her heart pounding against her rib cage, fast and with its little slipped beat. She decided that she had better start talking before the anticipation undid her and Will became concerned. But when she took a breath and opened her mouth to speak, her lungs stopped working. This wasn't like hyperventilating during an anxiety attack. Her breathing wasn't rapid. She simply couldn't force the air out of her lungs against the constriction. Her efforts produced only a high-pitched wheezing sound like she used to make sometimes on damp, cold mornings while chasing her pony around the paddock in Surrey, the sound that she hid from her parents so they wouldn't fuss over her breathing like they did with Greer and Tommy.

She watched alarm cloud Will’s eyes. “Kenz? MacKenzie? What’s happening? Are you okay?”

“Can’t . . . breathe . . . .”

"What should . . . what can I do?” 

She pushed her chair sideways and leaned forward with her forearms on her thighs. Don't try to force the air out, she reminded herself, that will make it worse. Little breaths, take shallow, little breaths. She wasn't dying, she told herself, it just felt that way. 

“The tea . . . let me . . . breathe . . . the steam.” He held the cup up to her mouth until she recovered enough to take it from him, at which point he used his hands to gently rub her back and massage her shoulders. “I'm okay,” she said after few more minutes, “I'm okay.”

Will kissed the back of her neck. “Mac, you don't have to do this . . . tell me . . . just promise me that you will find a therapist and talk about whatever it was that happened over there.”

“No,” she said emphatically, sitting up, still a little breathless, but much better. “Or rather, yes, yes, I do need to do this. I need to tell you.” She looked into his eyes. “Billy, my love, I want to tell you. Just let me do it my way, okay?” When he nodded, she rose and took his hand and led him to the living room sofa. When they were seated, she began.

“Do you remember when we got back from the UK after New Year’s 2007, and I was having a bad reaction . . . bloating and nausea . . . to the new birth control pills I'd gone on just before we left . . . ?” She paused for a breath, and he considered saying that he could never forget that time in their lives. They had been to Nebraska for Thanksgiving, where Mac had charmed Will’s sisters and brother, if not his father, and then gone to Mac’s parents’ home for Christmas and New Year’s where Will had been treated like a member of the McHale family. He didn't think he'd ever been as happy or contented in his life. But he chose to say nothing, and just wait for her to continue.

“So, we decided that I should stop taking them until I could get back to the doctor, but things were so crazy at the studio that I . . . well, we . . . sort of used the rhythm method . . . well, for over a month, maybe two.” Now, she did seem as if she wanted him to speak.

“I remember,” he said.

“We cut a lot of corners, so to speak, when technically, we should have been abstaining.” She smiled at him. “We did do a lot of things that didn't involve penetration, but . . . . I was so crazy about you, Billy. I know I was probably worse than you were . . . wanting you inside me, I mean.”

Will was so tired and caught up in the memory of being unable to get enough of her, that he had almost lost track of why she was telling him this. “Yeah,” he said fondly, touching the side of his wife’s face, “we skated through on some pretty thin ice.”

Something about the way MacKenzie looked back at him made him freeze, and his blood run cold. He didn't know why or what, a combination of intuition, memory and clues from her body language, most likely, but suddenly he knew . . . he simply knew that he knew . . . knew what this part of her story . . . their story . . . was going to be. She watched as the color drained from his face and his features registered surprise and concern. Inclining his head slightly, Will said in a voice that was little more than a whisper, “but we didn't . . . skate through . . . did we, Kenz?”

It was her lower lip being sucked between her teeth and her eyes breaking from his gaze that confirmed everything he had surmised. Slowly, she shook her head, and said, “no . . . no, Billy . . . we . . . we didn't. I . . . I got pregnant.”

Acting completely on instinct, he clutched her to him and lowered his head so that his lips and tongue could tease her lower lip free from her teeth. He kissed her repeatedly and told her that he loved her, would always love her and that nothing could ever change that fact. When they broke apart, she buried her face in his t-shirt and drank in the comfort that he offered, fortifying herself to continue.

"Why didn't you tell me?” he asked as gently as he could, not wanting even a scintilla of reproach to echo in his voice.

MacKenzie kept her face against him, but began to speak. Will strained to make out her words. “I was so stupid . . . so, so stupid. When I'd missed my period by enough that I thought I should buy a test,” she began, finally looking up at him, “I figured that it would be the start of our family . . . that we'd get married . . . .”

“There was nothing stupid about that,” he interrupted.

“No,” she smiled, and he saw tears glistening in her eyes, “I haven't gotten to the stupid part yet.” He vowed that he wouldn't interrupt again, that he would let her tell this at her own pace and in whatever order she chose. “Here comes the stupid part,” she said, trying for a smile. “Even though I felt like I could barely remember him . . . I knew that I'd never . . . never told you about seeing Brian again . . . sleeping with Brian again . . . after I'd started dating you. I didn't want to start our life . . . our baby’s life . . . and our marriage without disclosing it. I wanted to start with no secrets . . . I never imagined. . . . I should never have told you . . . not that way . . . .” She wiped violently at her eyes, trying not to cry.

“Kenz,” Will put his hands on her upper arms and held her out so that he could look her squarely in the eyes. “You are not responsible for my reaction. You know that it wasn't normal. It was sick. I was sick. Everything that I did to you . . . none of it was your fault. You never betrayed me the way . . . he did . . . my father did . . . or the way I thought you did.”

She didn't agree with him, well, not completely, but she wasn't going to argue, at least not now. She needed to keep telling this story. She feared that if she stopped, she would never be able to start again. And so she just looked at him, and finally gave a slight nod.

“After you . . . left . . . after you told me to get out of your life, I hung on for a while, calling and texting and emailing, telling myself that you’d . . . that you couldn't stay angry for long . . . we never did . . . I told myself that you’d talk to me, and then I'd tell you about being pregnant. But then, when Darius told me . . . “ God, Will hated the way her voice wavered with her attempt to suppress her pain and tears. “. . . told me that you’d left CNN . . . and were . . . going . . . had gone back to New York . . . .”

In that instant, it struck Will with nauseating intensity that she was talking about weeks, six or eight weeks, weeks of being pregnant, weeks of enduring his silence, weeks of messages, weeks of hoping that he'd calm down and think about everything . . . everything that he was throwing away, only to find out that he'd packed up and left town without a word. 

“Were you sick?” he whispered past the constriction in his throat. He had no idea why he'd asked that question.

“What?” Mac asked, momentarily confused.

“Back then . . . were you sick like this time?” Will had been released from the Federal Detention Center just in time for Mac’s last serious week-long bout of morning sickness, and one of the times, while she was sipping water and eating crackers, she’d told him about the weeks of being sick every day, about building a “nest” in the bathroom and comforting herself by listening to the playlists on his iPod.

"Oh! Sick? Yes. God! Sick as a dog. Maybe worse than this time.” Perversely, the thought seemed to cheer Mac up a little, but it had the opposite effect on her husband. He folded over on the sofa, burying his head in her lap. 

“I left you alone . . . twice . . . both times . . . both times . . . alone. Forgive me. Forgive me.”

“Billy . . . honey . . . There’s nothing to forgive.” She stroked his hair. “I got through it fine. Both times. Sweetheart, look at me.” Reluctantly, he raised his head. She kissed him, and wiped tears from his cheek with her thumbs. “Next time, you can be with me for every minute of it. You can watch me puke to your heart’s content.” She gave him a reassuring smile. “Okay?” When he didn't answer, she repeated the question, “okay?” Finally, she got a little nod. It was the best he could do as he wondered what punishment could possibly atone for the things he had done to her. “Let’s get into bed,” she suggested, figuring that they were going to need to be able to really hold on to each other when she told him the rest, the truly painful part of the story.

She took his hand again and they walked in silence. MacKenzie was a hand-holder, Will thought, looking down at their intertwined fingers. She always had been. In Washington, they would walk hand-in-hand for hours in the Spring, around the Mall, beginning at the Washington Monument, past the reflecting pond, and around to the Jefferson Memorial, through the Cherry blossoms. Then, for the next six years, he had avoided holding hands with anyone because it was a gesture of intimacy that he could not bear. Usually, he could simply avoid it by putting his hands in his pockets or clasping them behind his back, but like so many things, it became a source of friction with Nina. After she had made an issue out of his reluctance, and he'd told her that he just didn't like holding hands, she had taken to putting her hand in his in public, putting him in the position of submitting or appearing rude or unkind. Nina had grabbed his hand, Will remembered, seconds before the paparazzi had snapped the picture of them coming out of Per Se that appeared in Page Six along with the article speculating that he and Nina were headed toward marriage, the picture that had so upset MacKenzie. Had it been that he was holding Nina’s hand that cut Mac so deeply and convinced her that all was lost and he had fallen in love with Nina? What would he have done had he opened a newspaper and found a picture of Mac hand-in-hand with Wade Campbell? He couldn't imagine.

When they reached the bedroom, Will picked up a few of the pillows that had been on the floor since they were tossed there the night before. MacKenzie and her pillows. When she had arranged them to her liking, they crawled into bed and he took her into his arms, feeling the length of her body against him, comforting him, comforting her. He tried not to think ahead, think about the way this story would surely end. He knew that it would not be with the news that there was a child of six hidden away somewhere. He'd followed Mac’s time in the Middle East enough to know that by September, 2007, she was embedded with U.S. Army forces, reporting from Iraq, not caring for a newborn. The only question was whether she'd aborted or miscarried the baby. Either way, he knew that he was to blame. 

"What happened, Kenz?” His voice was so soft, she wasn't sure whether he'd spoken or her mind had supplied the prompt. Either way, it was time to begin again.

“After you left . . . .” She sighed a deep resigned sigh that hurt his heart. “Well, you remember my mushroom in the dark period after Genoa . . . It was like that on steroids. I . . . came apart. I was selfish and immature . . . .” He started to protest, but she stopped him by holding up her hand and giving him her no nonsense stare. “I was, Billy. There’s no excuse. I didn't take care of myself. I couldn't . . . didn't try hard enough . . . to eat . . . or sleep. I lost weight instead of gaining it. My doctor was . . . Well, he threatened to put me in hospital. Tears spilled over her lower eyelids and down her cheeks and her words came out in short breathless bursts, “I knew . . . I knew . . . I was . . . endangering . . . our . . . baby . . . . I didn't want to . . . I wanted him . . . God, Billy, you’ve got to believe . . . that I wanted him . . . but it felt like I couldn't . . . stop . . . what I was doing . . . but that's just . . . bullshit.”

She took a couple of wheezy breaths to steady herself. “I screwed up everywhere. I couldn't . . . seem to keep things in my head . . . on the job, I mean. It was . . . I was a mess, Billy.”

A voice in Will’s head, a voice that sounded a lot like Jim Harper, kept screaming at him that he had done this. This is what he'd done when he'd cut her out of his life. A vision of her from the morning she’d told him about Brian crept unbidden into his consciousness. Screaming, sobbing, gasping, clutching at him, she had begged him to listen, to please just listen, and not to go, not to walk away and leave her. How had he converted that reality into the image that he'd carried around for years? How had he convinced himself that the disclosure of her time with Brian came from a desire to break off the relationship with him? Another damaged child. Oh, Charlie, Will thought, are you hearing this? What do you think of your boy now?

“Finally,” she continued, “Darius came to me and said that . . . I needed to . . . get things together . . . or . . . . He told me to take a holiday . . . go somewhere where I could heal. He said that . . . if I did, he'd put me on a crew that was doing a feature on U.S. forces doing humanitarian work in Kabul. Filming was to start the first week in July. So, I agreed . . . I had no choice . . . I could tell from the way he spoke.” She seemed far away, now, but calmer. Her gaze fixed at a point in the middle of the room. “And, I thought that maybe . . . . Well, anyway, I told my parents that I was going to Afghanistan and that I'd spend a few weeks with them on my way over. But, it didn’t work out too well. I'd not told them much about what had happened between us, and of course they didn't know that I was pregnant. I left Surrey after about a week. The Ambassador got me on a diplomatic charter to Kabul. That was June 5th.”

She had calmed down during this part of her recitation sufficiently for Will to ask her about something she had said earlier, something that had barely registered until he'd stopped to think about it. “Mac, sweetheart, when you were talking about the baby before, did you say . . . did they tell you it was a boy?”

He instantly regretted asking when anguish and grief came rushing back into her eyes. She nodded. “I had an ultrasound and . . . well . . . .” He waited, but she had apparently thought better of what she was going to say and changed her mind. She lapsed into silence. Again, Will was struck by how far into the pregnancy she had been. Almost without thinking, he ran his hand across the gentle swell of her belly. She seemed very pregnant to him now, but still not far enough along for them to learn the gender of this child. A boy. The brother of the baby under his hand. He’d had a son. The reality was almost unfathomable.

She was looking at him. “It's a lot to get your head around, isn't it, Billy?” She tried a weak smile. “I guess we’re pretty fertile, you and I. We seem to be good at making babies.”

"What happened, Kenz? You sent me an email saying you’d arrived in Kabul and then nothing until the voice messages on June 7th.”

“It was June 8th in Kabul . . . at least some of the messages were left on what was June 8th for me.”

“The day you gave up on me.”

“Never completely . . . .” She touched his face and looked lovingly into his eyes. “Never completely, Billy. I could never really give up on you . . . even when I ran away.” 

"I don't understand. What do you mean that you ran away?”

Suddenly, MacKenzie curled against him more tightly. “Hold me, Billy . . . tell me that everything is going to be alright.”

“Everything IS alright, Mac. I love you, wildly, madly and totally, and I will continue to love you for the rest of my life. Nothing is ever going to change that. I swear. I promise.” She remained pressed against him so that when she spoke again, her voice was muffled. As she talked, he was aware of their baby tucked up safe between them and ached for the child he had never known.

"It was early evening and I’d just finished ordering room service when my back started to hurt. I didn’t recognize it, but I was . . . I was starting . . . into labor. The food arrived, but I couldn't eat . . . nothing new there . . . so I just crawled into bed. My body clock was not adjusted to Afghanistan and I was exhausted, so despite the pain, I actually fell asleep. I woke up a couple of hours later. That was the first time I called you.

“I don't know if I recognized . . . how bad things were at that point. The pains had gotten stronger and were coming in waves . . . but . . . I didn't want to face . . . I couldn't let myself face . . . that I was losing . . . the baby.” She had moved her head while she was talking and was now looking at Will. He tried to keep his expression neutral had no idea what his face actually looked like. Her face looked strained and unbearably sad. “Crazy,” she continued with the ghost of a smile, “I remember getting it into my head that if I . . . could talk to you . . . everything would . . . be fine.” She smiled at him but it didn't reach her eyes. When he closed his in an attempt absorb the pain her words had caused, she kissed him softly. “I know I called again shortly after I woke up and left another message.

"Anyway, at some point . . . after another couple of hours . . . the pain was . . . intense . . . and the contractions were getting closer together . . . I chewed through a pillow trying not to scream . . . and by then, even I couldn't kid myself any longer. I knew . . . the baby was coming . . . and that it was far too early . . . .” She drifted off lost in her thoughts, as Will tried to comprehend the reality of her story. She had been in labor for hours, in a hotel room, alone.

“You were alone, Kenz?” he whispered softly. “All that time you were alone, in pain, and alone?”

“Do you know, Billy, that at the best neonatal intensive care units, they can sometimes save babies born as early as twenty-two weeks?” Will shook his head. “They can. He was twenty-three or four weeks . . . but of course . . . we were in a hotel room in Kabul.” 

"You never got to a hospital?" Will could hear his voice shaking, and saw his hand tremble as he brought it up to caress her face. “You . . . had . . . the baby . . . in the hotel? Was there a doctor?”

“Later . . . I was taken to a military hospital . . . but . . . I started bleeding, Billy . . . bleeding a lot. I lost consciousness . . . a few times, and my memory of things . . . at the end is spotty. I didn't think that a doctor could help me . . . help us. The baby . . . was born . . . but he didn't . . . live. He was too little.” 

Her voice had taken on a flat affect that scared Will more than her sobbing or even her inability to breathe. He wanted to tell her to stop, to put all of this . . . this horror . . . out of her mind, but instead he heard himself asking her what she meant. “I don't understand . . . “

"He was born . . . alive . . . our son . . . he lived . . . for a little while . . . I held him . . . I named him. I thought maybe I'd just imagined . . . but now I think I had water . . . I baptized him . . . William Duncan . . . and then . . . he died.” With those words, the dam broke, and she made a high pitched keening sound like an animal in agony. Will didn't even hear his own scream.

He held her and rocked her until neither had any tears left. When MacKenzie recovered sufficiently to be able to think about something other than her grief or the effort of trying to breathe, she realized that she had never fully experienced the loss of her child . . . William’s death . . . until now, until she had done it with her body pressed full length against that of the man with whom she had conceived him. Was that why she had run? Was it more than shame and guilt? Was it because she hadn't been ready for this? But it was necessary now. She knew. She would heal now because she owed it to Will and to the child she now carried. If only Charlie were here. Charlie, who had brought them both to where they needed to be. You were right, Charlie, you didn't know all of it, but you were right. 

She looked up at Will who also seemed lost in his own thoughts. She looked down at his hand resting gently on her abdomen. She would talk to a therapist. She would face her memories and learn to give them a place in her life, in their lives, in their children’s lives. She could do this. They could do this together. Will’s strength and love for her were the key.

"Kenz . . . sweetheart,” he began hesitantly, bring MacKenzie out of her reverie. “The last message you left for me on . . . I guess it was June 8th for you . . . What? . . . Why? . . . What was happening then?”

“I thought I was dying,” she replied simply. “I was saying good-bye.” 

“Where were you?” he asked through the constriction that the thought of Mac dying brought to his throat.

“Still in the room . . . my hotel room.”

"Alone?"

“I’d lost a lot of blood. You . . . I’d no idea then how much blood there was in the human body. I hadn't been to Iraq . . . seen death . . . people bleed out. It was . . . everywhere. I see it . . . smell it . . . in the nightmare. I thought I was dying. The baby . . . William . . . . “ She made herself say his name although doing so sliced her open again. “William was dead. I think when I dialed your number, I was . . . going to tell you about him . . . but then . . . it seemed cruel . . . so I just said goodbye . . . .”

“You never called for help?” She shook her head. “Did you . . .” he asked slowly, deliberately, but softly and lovingly, “Kenz, did you want to die?”

She thought about her answer for a long time. She saw the baby, still and pale, wrapped in the University of Nebraska t-shirt. “At that moment, I think I did.” She looked at his tortured face. “I'm sorry, Billy.” Neither of them knew exactly what she was apologizing for. “I had nothing to live for. I'd lost you. Our baby was gone. I . . . .” She reached up to caress his chin. Suddenly, she flashed on an image of the baby’s body, clean and wrapped in a white cloth, but she had no memory of such a time. She shook her head to dispel the vision, and continued answering Will’s question. “What I remember was wanting to float away . . . just float away . . . where there would be no more pain. I'd hurt for so long. Maybe more than die . . . I just wanted the pain to end.”

He moaned and clutched her closer, begging her to forgive him.

“I love you, Billy,” she whispered. “Kiss me. Make love to me.” As MacKenzie said those words, the child within her fluttered as if in agreement. “I . . . we . . . need you.”


	6. Therapy

Will lost count of the number of times he brought his wife to orgasm, the number of times he danced himself back from the edge. He was truly amazed at his staying power considering that watching MacKenzie lose herself in the sensations he could produce with his hands and his mouth, seeing her tremble and her eyes turn to liquid chocolate, losing focus each time he drove her to peak was just about the most arousing thing he could imagine. Finally, she climbed on top of him and took control, and he was powerless in the face of the waves of pleasure she produced. He put his hands on each side of her body, grasping her hips and steadying her, as he drove himself deeply and repeatedly into her. She threw her head back and made a high-pitched moaning, gurgling sound in her throat as her muscles tightened around him like a vice, a spasm that would have stopped his motion if he had not been so slick with her wetness. He managed three more thrusts before surrendering and emptying himself totally and completely into her body.

He felt MacKenzie’s hands loosen their grip on his shoulders and slide limply down his arms, as she folded over to rest her sweating forehead against his equally slippery chest. After a moment, he heard her inhale in the way he knew meant that she was going to speak.

“I love you, Billy. I’ve always loved you. I'll never stop loving you. You are all I need. You heal me. You comfort me. You complete me.”

“How can I comfort you? How can you not blame me for your pain?” he asked when he could speak again.

“How can you not blame me?” she responded.

“I'm serious, Mac,” he said, pushing the hair from her face when she raised her head to look at him. “I . . . there's no excuse for my behavior . . . cutting you off . . . refusing to listen, or return your messages . . . leaving D.C. without a word. Jesus! Those’er the actions of a stupid, selfish, fucking teenager, not a grown man.”

“And I was a grown woman . . . I was over thirty . . . and I couldn't pull myself together sufficiently not to . . . to k . . . to endanger the life of our baby. I don't care what you did . . . and I'm not saying that your freezing me out . . . didn't cut me to the core . . . but he was inside my body, Billy. He was my responsibility and I . . . I fucked it up.”

Will realized that if he kept on with this conversation, he'd risk undoing all of the benefits of their lovemaking, and that what he needed to do was feed her while she was calm, feed her and place a call to Jacob Habib. He glanced at the bedside clock, relieved that she'd had the foresight to call Jim and buy them the day. Just then, as if his thoughts had conjured it up, Mac’s cell phone buzzed. He reached over and retrieved it from the bedside table. Glancing at the caller ID, Will raised his eyebrows in warning and handed it to MacKenzie, saying, “Sloan.”

"Sloan, what can I do for you?”

“Tell me what the fuck is going on. I'm doing the show. Jim's jumpy as a cat on a hot tin roof and being more closed lipped than usual. Are you guys having problems or are you just having a sex day?”

“A sex day?”

“It's like a snow day only you play inside instead of out . . . .”

“Yes. I get it. No, Will and I are not having problems.”

“I'm not sure I believe you, Kenzie. Will’s missing a show, and he’s not on his death bed. You'd never just chuck it all and . . . .”

“Maybe this is the new us.”

“Yeah, right.” Sloan still sounded skeptical.

“Sloan,” Mac’s voice was serious now. “There’s nothing to worry about. I had something . . . that I needed to tell . . . talk to Will about. We needed time together. That's all. We’re fine . . . I'm not lying to you . . . we’ve never been closer.” 

They talked about some of Sloan’s ideas for the show, and just as they were about to hang up, Mac told her to be sure to let Jim know that they'd talked and everything was fine . . . “might get him down from the roof.”

When she went looking for Will, she found him standing in the kitchen, wearing nothing but his boxers and an ACN t-shirt, preparing brunch. He was making her pancakes. Her favorite breakfast. She walked up behind him while he faced the griddle. Pressing herself to him, she wrapped her arms around his waist, and rested her cheek against his back. The pose made her aware again of how large and round her belly was becoming. She desperately needed a shopping trip to a Pea in the Pod. She was so unbelievably happy to be having this baby . . . making a person that was part Billy, part her and totally someone else entirely. It was an intoxicating high and an insane contrast to the period of mourning that she knew she was . . . no, they were . . . entering for the loss of her . . . their . . . first child . . . their child . . . hers and Billy’s . . . another child, just like this one.

Mac realized that she had never allowed herself to think of the baby that way . . . not at the same time that she thought about Will. That was pain that she hadn’t thought she could survive . . . certainly not before, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, while she and Will were apart, and not even after she'd come to News Night and tried to forge some sort of working relationship with him. After the engagement, she had known that she would have to tell Will . . . or was it that she wanted to tell him, she wasn't sure . . . but even then, facing it was beyond her. She’d thought she might last December, but had been unable to tell him what the matter was, even though she’d barely gotten through the Sandy Hook coverage without going completely to pieces, and Will was visibly concerned about her. But now, suddenly, this morning, by some miracle, sharing her baby’s existence and death with Will had become the key to her salvation. It was the light that would finally guide her home.

But, poor Billy. They had so much grieving still to do. She felt Charlie’s absence slice into her like a blade ripping her side. She needed Charlie! Will needed him! Suddenly, she was overwhelmed by the fact that Will was still mourning Charlie . . . mourning the only loving father he'd ever known . . . and now he would also be mourning his son. She wondered if Will had realized the baby would be about Ned’s age now, another little boy holding Will’s hand and missing Charlie. That is, if she'd done her job right. The knife plunged again. She squeezed Will tight enough to make him take notice and feel a flash of unease. 

“William.” She made herself think of the fetus . . . the baby . . . by his name. She instantly regretted it. Well, not regretted it exactly, but she could feel herself slipping and she didn't want to alarm Will. The face of an infant leapt into her consciousness, tiny . . . so tiny . . . covered in blood and fluid. She had a cloth . . . no, a t-shirt . . . Will’s t-shirt . . . of course, Will’s t-shirt . . . the habit of hers he loved to hate. She had water . . . in a bottle . . . she could wash the baby’s face. She reached for the bottle that was on the floor near her. She was on the floor. She could feel the warm pool of liquid that was her own blood and the scratchy hotel rug on her arms when she stretched for the water bottle. Her arms reacted to the memory as if there were bugs crawling on them and she would have scratched them raw except that would have required her to take them from around Will. So she squeezed him tighter still. It helped to slow and steady her breathing and heartbeat, she thought, and mask some of the shaking. 

Will thought about a number of responses to his wife’s obvious distress and settled on continuing to cook pancakes. It was the most difficult choice for him to make, but he sensed that it was the best one. When Mac first started hanging on like a drowning soul, he’d had a small revelation that this is what Jim was talking about. She was going back. Will realized that Jim’s calm, understated . . . “I'm here and I don't need to know or change anything” . . . reaction, although born out of their relative ages, positions and the sibling nature of their relationship, was beneficial to MacKenzie. And so, Will fought his desire to turn around and bring her back to the present, to talk about it, have her share it all with him. Instead, he kept on making pancakes.

She had poured a small amount of the water into her hand and dribbled some onto the infant’s little face. The weak mewling sound she’d heard before turned into a lusty newborn cry. That was the moment . . . her breath hitched and she pressed her face harder, harder into Will's back . . . that was the moment she'd known that the baby was . . . that William Duncan McAvoy, Junior, had been . . . fully alive. Her fingers relaxed almost involuntarily and more water trickled out of her hand. She remembered speaking the words. It hadn't been concern for his immortal soul that motivated her. No God that she could believe in would let words and water determine His treatment of an innocent child. Naming the baby was her way of acknowledging William’s personhood . . . his life . . . however short . . . to make him . . . her child, she had thought back then. But now, everything was different, and what she had done was to make him always their first son.

Just as Will got the last pancake onto the plate, MacKenzie’s knees buckled and she seemed to stop breathing. Luckily, although they lost strength, her arms, by some force of inertia, remained wrapped around Will’s torso. This gave him time to flip off the burner, and twist, then turn around and catch her as she sank to the kitchen floor. Her momentum was enough that after a painful twinge in the knee he was pivoting on, Will decided to go with her.

MacKenzie fell forward onto her hands and knees, a pose that within the year and for the rest of his life, Will would associate with his wife in labor. She was clearly struggling to breathe. For the second time that day, she could not seem to make air move into and out of her lungs. Will knelt beside her and bracing himself on one arm and taking most of her weight with the other, he lowered his lips to her neck, and spoke soothing reassurances that she was alright, that this would pass, she just needed to relax and the air would move again.

“Can't . . . breathe . . . can't . . . .”

“I know, Kenz. I know, sweetheart. “You will. It’s passing. It's passing. I'm here. Nothing can harm you . . . ever again.” Get a grip, Will reminded himself, when his composure . . . or what passed for it, anyway . . . broke between “you” and “ever.” She doesn't need you upset or frightened, he told himself. But, he was. He was frightened. In fact, he was scared shitless. 

It took an uncomfortably long time, but finally Mac smiled and cupped his chin with her hand, and told him she was okay. She didn't offer to describe what she had recalled that set her off, and he didn't ask. After a few more minutes of sitting together on the floor, Mac stood.

About an hour and a half after Will had started cooking, they sat down to microwave reheated pancakes, some nitrite-free, uncured bacon he had found, juice and herbal tea. Her breathing for most of the rest of the day seemed to Will to be slightly labored, and he was keenly aware that when she spoke, she became breathless if she went on too long. Nonetheless, she insisted from the time she got up from the kitchen floor that she was fine. They didn't talk about the baby born in Kabul or anything about their time apart while they ate. They spoke only about the here and now. Mac described her “Sex Day” phone call with Sloan, and as another term entered their lexicon of “family jokes,” they both genuinely laughed. 

Then, Will said, in what he hoped was a matter-of-fact tone of voice, “while you were on the phone with Sloan, I made an appointment for this afternoon with Jack Habib.”

“That will be good, Billy.” Yes, good, she thought, give him an opportunity to process some of this. She had always supported his time in therapy, even if she didn't find it helpful for herself.

“For both of us.”

Her eyes grew large with surprise, and Will watched her recalling with obvious reticence, her promise to obtain a referral to a therapist. Okay. She’d just have to try again, MacKenzie thought. She’d never felt satisfied with her attempts at therapy when she’d gotten back from the Middle East, but after her little stunt on the kitchen floor, even MacKenzie McHale could not bring herself to assert that she didn't need help. Besides, she’d promised Will she would talk to someone about the nightmares.

 

Dr. Jacob “Jack” Habib hoped that his face was a mask of professional detachment and competence, but he couldn't be sure. Inside, his mind was playing catch-up, racing to process the afternoon’s revelations . . . that MacKenzie McHale had been pregnant when she had revealed her four-month reconciliation with Brian Brenner over a year before, and that Will McAvoy, ignoring her sobbing entreaties to stop and listen, had stepped over her, and pushing aside her attempts to block the door or grasp his leg, had left her on the floor of his apartment after telling her that by the time he returned, he expected all traces of her to have been removed from his life. Now, she was describing a hotel room in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she had miscarried the child . . . although, Habib thought, some of what she said sounded more like she went into premature labor, but he didn't want to interrupt her to clarify. The important part, he knew, was that she had not called for help . . . not reached out to anyone, except to leave messages for Will. 

Or, perhaps, Habib thought, in a way, she had been testing Will . . . would he pick up the phone, hear her and summon help, or would his indifference confirm that she had no reason to go on living? He thought that this would be fertile ground for MacKenzie to explore, and that understanding why she had decided to suffer alone would be a big part of her recovery. 

Habib studied the people sitting opposite him as Mac spoke. As devastating as her tale was, the McAvoy’s relationship appeared solid. They clung to one another, Mac small and curled snugly under Will’s protective embrace. When they had originally seated themselves on his sofa, Habib had noted that they’d kept a few formal inches between them. But he’d quickly concluded that it did not appear to be the product of stress or tension, and most probably, they had simply unconsciously sat themselves down the way they were used to doing at business meetings. Then, almost as soon as Mac started talking, Will had reached out for her, and as the painful story unfolded, they had moved closer and closer until the next move would put her onto his lap. It had been fascinating for Habib to watch MacKenzie allow herself to become increasingly vulnerable in mind and body, until Will seemed to be literally holding her together.

Will had not said a word since Mac started describing the morning of their break-up, but his hands had been in constant motion, stroking his wife’s arms and back, teasing her lower lip from between her bottom teeth, repeatedly moving a wisp of hair that fell across her face and placing it behind her ear. His face, Habib thought, looked like a man trapped in a cage of agony. Jesus! Habib knew that after Will had proposed in November, he’d opened up to the possibility, or rather, the certainty, that he had attributed motives and actions to Mac in seeing Brenner and telling Will about it that had not accurately reflected her reality. But this? This reality was beyond . . . imagination. 

“May ask you a question?” Habib looked at MacKenzie, trying to discern how much the control she was obviously exerting to get this story out was costing her.

“Sure.”

"Exactly how advanced was the pregnancy when you . . . lost the baby?”

“Twenty-three, almost twenty-four weeks.” Mac’s reply was barely audible. Something of the shock that he felt must have registered on Habib’s face because she quickly assumed a reassuring tone, “I don't have much memory of it. Lots and lots of that time is . . . gone. I suppose that’s . . . that's a good thing, really.” She didn't sound at all sure of this. “Some of that’s because I started losing consciousness from blood loss . . . at the end.

“You bled?” Habib asked, knowing instantly that it was a silly question. All women bleed after giving birth. Not a miscarriage, he thought, no, not at twenty-four weeks. It had been labor and a stillbirth, and . . . Christ! . . . she had been alone.

“Yes. Quite a lot. Catastrophic blood loss, one of the doctors called it. God!” she raised a hand involuntarily in surprise, “I'd forgotten that completely until just now.”

"How is it that you didn't die?" Habib interrupted, trying to do it gently, but unable to control himself.

“Something of a miracle, actually.” And so, Mac described the young Afghani maid coming to her room to clean, letting herself in when no one responded to the knock on the door, and finding Mac, hemorrhaging and unconscious, she'd run screaming into the hallway. The hotel’s manager was summoned, and he called an American medivac unit. “Luckily for me,” she recounted, “it was in the neighborhood.” She explained how the helicopter had arrived within minutes, and the medics began giving her whole blood on the spot and transported her to a U.S. Military hospital.

Habib was running through the many questions he'd like to ask when the sound of his phone timer told him that they needed to wrap up. He had another patient in 25 minutes. He started mentioning other doctors in the area to whom he could refer MacKenzie, and was in the middle of asking her if she had any preferences as to age, gender, training, when her face went pale and she grasped Will's arm so tightly that her knuckles were white. She made a gasping, whistling sound and was obviously struggling to get her breath.

“Please . . . please,” she whispered, “let me . . . come back . . . here . . . let me have Billy with me.” Mac clutched more tightly at her husband. She looked terrified. “Please, I want . . . to . . . to . . . talk to you,” she implored Habib.

First, do no harm. “Of course. Of course, you and Will can come back.” Jack Habib didn't have time to process all of the ramifications of what he was saying. He knew he'd spend some serious moments figuring out the ethics of the path he'd just committed them to. Another conversation with an imaginary Abe. But in the moment, he knew with certainty that any other answer but the one he gave had the potential to cause MacKenzie harm. Wasn't that the point of the oath? To give you a default mode, a touchstone, when there was no time to think? 

The lawyer in the room spoke. “Thank you. Thank you. This means a lot to me.” He kissed his wife’s hair, MacKenzie having grown small again and buried herself once more against his body. “She . . . the . . . nightmares . . . .” Will’s voice cracked, and he had to stop speaking to steady himself. “I'll sign any thing you need, confidentiality waivers, indemnifications,” Will said, waiving the hand that wasn't tracing circles on Mac’s back in the air. He was doing better talking about documents. “Hell, I'll even draft the releases, if you’ll agree to . . . help . . . her.” It caught Will in the throat again, the wellspring of intense, conflicting emotions . . . love, guilt, fear, contentment, fulfillment, regret . . . that swirled in his breast. 

“That offer means a lot to me,” Habib said simply. “I have a major request to include.” He cleared his throat. “Mac. Mac,” he repeated, as her head came up and she turned to look at him. “ I'd like permission to talk freely to your OB and he . . . .”

“She,” Mac corrected him.

. . . and she to me. That will require you to waive certain privacy rights for both of us.”

“Okay,” Mac said in a resigned way that made Habib realize that she was only beginning to let people into this chapter of her life. “But you’ll have to wait a bit.” She looked sheepish.

“He . . . she . . . doesn't know.” Habib didn't need to phrase it as a question.

Mac shook her head and pushed herself up into more of a sitting position. "I've not told anybody really. I promised . . . I wouldn't tell anyone until I told Will. But . . .” she turned to Will as fresh tears came into her eyes, “Billy, I'm sorry. I called . . . the other night, in the office . . . I was going to tell you when we got home but that was the night I felt the baby moving . . . you remember . . . .”

“Yeah, definitely,” Will said fervently, hoping to bring a little smile to her lips.

“Well, while you were on the air, I was thinking about telling you . . . answering your questions about the nightmares, and . . . and I started feeling . . . panic . . . a panic attack coming on, and . . . I called my father and talked to him about how I couldn't seem to tell you that I'd been pregnant before. He assumed it had been an early miscarriage and I didn't correct him. But . . . but still . . . I think that broke my promise . . . I'm sorry . . . .” She dissolved again. Habib reached down to retrieve the box of tissues from where Mac had let it fall to the floor and handed it to Will.

Will dried his wife’s tears and gestured for her to blow her nose. “Christ, Mac. I don’t care. It's okay. Really, it's okay. It's fine with me . . . more than fine . . . that you were able to tell your father.” She looked at him like he'd just commuted her death sentence and hung her head. “My God, Kenz, who . . . who did you promise . . . who . . . .?”

“William.” The name was barely there and Habib wasn't sure he'd heard her correctly, Mac’s voice was so low.

A scene flashed before Will’s eyes. Mac was lying in a pool of blood, her cheek against a newborn baby’s forehead, whispering that someday, she would tell his father about him. Will’s throat closed and at the same time, his stomach lurched and he thought that he would vomit, but since giving in to that urge would mean taking his arms from around Mac, he fought for control. Regret, guilt, remorse, stronger than he had ever experienced, covered and drowned him. 

Habib watched as Will began to sob and fall sideways on the sofa, taking MacKenzie, who was still wrapped tightly in his arms, with him. They lay there. He buried his head against her neck, and for the first time since entering the therapist’s office, Will McAvoy allowed himself to experience his emotions.


	7. Memories

Will sat in his office thinking. It was still early. Staff were trickling in, drinking coffee and saying hello to each other. His wife had left him at the elevator, telling him that if she was “going to be in any kind of shape” for tomorrow morning’s appointment with her obstetrician . . . they had scheduled it immediately upon leaving Habib’s office the day before . . . “today needs to be about work.” She needed to go to her own floor, needed to “screw with Pruit a little,” maybe talk to Reese or drop in on Leona, “do my job, do anything to stay in 2013.” He knew that she also meant that she needed to be with people other than him, to not be with the man with whom she had shared the revelations, tears, and pain of yesterday. He understood. It just hurt a little, despite his understanding and even his agreement, but he thought that he'd well hidden his small twinge of pain and much larger stab of guilt.

So here he sat, the evening’s copy mostly a scratched out couple of lines on his yellow pad, unable to concentrate on anything but thoughts of MacKenzie. He was awash in memories. Some of them were painful, but many of them, most really, were memories of happy times. For some reason, scattered moments from his wedding reception were playing in his mind, not the eleven minute long one that ended with federal marshals flashing badges and putting him in handcuffs, but the one a few weeks ago that was a slightly scaled down version of the party originally planned to accompany their church wedding in June. There had been formal invitations on crème colored linen Crane’s stationary (“Ambassador Sir Edward and Lady Margaret McHale request the pleasure of your company at a reception to celebrate the marriage of their daughter MacKenzie Morgan McHale to William Duncan McAvoy”) and a large contingent of friends and family had descended on New York for the occasion. 

With the help of several undergarments from a company Will had never heard of before, Mac was able to squeeze into the dress that Vera Wang had designed for her wedding. She had looked spectacular.

“If my kid comes out flat,” he'd joked, “I'm suing Spanx. Just wanted you to be forewarned.”

“Your kid’s about the size of a dwarf hamster. She has plenty of room, which is more than I can say,” Mac had replied, looking with dismay at her breasts straining the front of the dress. Although a confirmed leg man, Will had to admit that pregnancy had its perks.

A large British contingent, most of his family and a respectable group of his college buddies had been there, the ACN crowd sans Pruit, Leona, Reese, Nancy and her children and grandchildren, other assorted friends, including Molly, who had not been consigned to the “loser table,” and what seemed to Will to be half the journalists and diplomats in the free world. Since Mac couldn't drink, he didn't either, and with the exception of one toke off a joint that was being shared out on a balcony by Leona, Rebecca, Neal and a couple of twenty-somethings he didn't recognize, Will had remained stone cold sober. He'd had the time of his life. 

Near the end of the party, he'd been taken aside by a very tipsy Catherine McHale, his sister-in-law . . . one of his sisters-in-law . . . the one closest in age to MacKenzie. (As Mac had observed, it seemed they were up to their collective eyeballs in sisters-in-law.)

“Daddy’s in his cups,” Cat had said in a confidential sounding, if slightly slurred, whisper, “and telling people how he introduced Mackie to you.” Will had greeted this news by looking thoroughly perplexed. Cat had giggled. “Haven't you heard the story of the first time Mackie saw you?”

“Heard the story? I was under the impression that I was there.”

Cat giggled again. “I didn't say, the first time Mackie met you . . . I'm sure you were present for that. I said the first time she saw you. Apparently, you haven't . . . .”

“I'm really confused.”

“It was September 11, 2001 . . . .”

“What?!” 

“Don't interrupt, please,” Cat had said sternly, and then giggled again. “All will be revealed in due time, my brother.” He’d just nodded and smiled, thinking how like Mac she was. “We were all at home,” she began. “Michaelmas term hadn't started and Mackie’d just finished a post-graduate year at university in journalism. She was twenty-five and waiting to see if she’d gotten the job she was after with the BBC.” Hearing that, Will felt ancient. He'd been on his third career by 2001. “Daddy got a call from someone about the planes hitting the World Trade Center towers and for most of the evening, we were all glued to the telly, but Daddy and Mackie most of all. Everyone else gave up, did other things or went to bed. Mac must have also gone to bed at some point because sometime in the middle of the night, I was awakened by Daddy standing over Mackie’s bed . . . our rooms connected through a common loo and the doors were open . . . he was telling her that she must wake up and come and see something . . . or, as it turned out . . . “ Catherine McHale smiled sweetly at Will. “. . . someone.”

"Me?"

“You,” she confirmed. “Seems that at some juncture or other during the night, Daddy had gone on the computer looking for updates and stumbled across ACN’s coverage. You hooked him, and then her. I think they were with you all the rest of the night and into the morning. I went back to sleep, but I remember him saying, ‘You must come and see this young man who’s reporting for Atlantis News. He’s exceptional, Mackie. You can see that he's exhausted, but he's still coherent, accurate and compassionate. Brilliant. Simply brilliant.’ They were still watching you when I got up in the morning.” 

Cat’s impression of the Ambassador had made him smile, but the scene she’d described . . . Mac and her father watching him from across an ocean . . . made his throat constrict and his eyes sting. September 11, 2001. MacKenzie McHale had first laid eyes on him on September 11, 2001. As much as being the event that had launched his career in television journalism, he had always thought of it as the night Charlie Skinner had become his father. Now, he knew that on the other side of the Atlantic, the woman who was to become his wife had been with him through that night as well. He’d had no idea the expression on his face as Cat’s story ended, but she had risen up on tiptoes, kissed him on the cheek, and then melted back onto the dance floor.

At home that night, as he'd fought with some of the tiny buttons on her dress, Mac had said, “I hear that Cat told you about Daddy waking me up to see ‘the extraordinary young man’ who would . . . “ She turned to face him and cupped his chin in her hands. “. . . become the love of my life.” When he asked why she'd never told him about watching him on 9/11, she replied that it had always seemed to her that the night had been something special that he'd shared with Charlie Skinner into which she’d seen no need to “interject myself.” She had confessed though that she'd “allowed” the Ambassador to “pull some strings in high places at CNN” to get her application considered when the EP job opened up on his show. She’d commented ruefully that if the job she'd set her cap for at the BBC hadn't come through, or Brian Brenner hadn't been sent over by Newsweek to write a feature about BBC News, she might have tried to find Will earlier and things might have been different. 

Will had always been one for considering how things might have played out if only something had been different. If his father hadn't come home at that particular time, on that particular night, after that particular number of drinks . . . . Yesterday, he had been handed one that eclipsed all others. If only his son had lived. What then? If he'd been born in a hospital . . . well, the right hospital . . . he’d be six. Ned's age. Will knew that after yesterday, he would forever look at children and wonder . . . . Mac had told him how painful being with babies and young children had been for her. Another reason, she'd said, for staying in Iraq. 

“The whole world over there was so crazy and surreal, it was easier seeing children in that context and not thinking . . . as much . . . about William. But take me to a park in London with prams and nannies and young mums . . . I lasted about half an hour once with Sheila and Tessa, when Tess was six months or so . . . I had to leave.” Mac had given him a rueful smile. She’d said these things in a matter-of-fact tone that had made him want to die. “I'm sure Sheila thought I was quite mental.”

Will pulled himself away from thoughts of his son. I’m not going there! I need to give Mac a normal day. Forcefully, Will returned to memories of the reception. It had been a hell of a party! So many great moments, like Mac’s orchestration of Daniel Craig’s introduction to Leona Lansing. Married to Mac’s Cheltenham friend and surrogate “older sister,” Rachel Weisz, Craig walked up to Leona’s table, kissed her hand, and said, “the name’s Craig, ma’am, Daniel Craig.”

"Get over here, McMac!” Leona had shouted, standing and beckoning the bride to her table with both arms. “You mean to tell me that night in the dining room, during that entire time I was ranting about missing my golden opportunity to meet Daniel Craig, you were sitting there thinking that all I had to do was ask you to introduce us!” Will watched his stunning young wife smile and walk into Leona’s embrace, after giving a nod of confirmation in that slightly self-deprecating way he loved. Will knew that in her head, Mac was replying that the farthest thing from her mind that horrible night they'd retracted Genoa was Daniel fucking Craig, but whatever. He smiled again at the memory.

Will had dated Rachel Weisz very briefly . . . two dinners right around the time that she had taken up with Aronofsky. But long enough for her to tell him that she had a friend whom she imagined he would like, and that if he ever got the chance to cross paths with a journalist at the BBC named MacKenzie McHale, he should get to know her. “Extraordinary” had been one of the words that Weisz had used to describe her friend, also “brilliant . . . just crazy smart,” along with “shy, a bit prudish and not very sexually experienced.” Great, he'd thought as she spoke, a homely, virginal bookworm in a cardigan buttoned to the neck, wearing reading glasses. He'd been right about the glasses. But everything else . . . . It had taken almost a month and a call to Weisz for him to realize that the stunning, articulate, leggy brunette with the creamy skin and swirling green-brown eyes he could not stop thinking about was the same MacKenzie McHale that Rachel had been describing.

Will had told himself all of the reasons that a personal relationship with a co-worker was a bad idea. He’d wondered long and hard just what in the world he was doing lusting for his new, young EP. He was too old to be mooning after her . . . after anyone . . . like a schoolboy. But he couldn't stop . . . not the daydreams, not the surreptitious glances, and certainly not the nocturnal fantasies. It had gotten to the point that he preferred masturbating while thinking of MacKenzie to dating anyone else. He knew that upon her arrival at CNN, MacKenzie had just gotten out . . . been dumped, rumor had it . . . of a long term relationship with Newsweek columnist, Brian Brenner. Will thought him a bit of an ass from the few times they'd met, but Brenner had managed to attract and hold onto MacKenzie McHale so maybe he was worth a second look. But then, if the rumors were true that Brenner had ended the relationship because Mac had wanted marriage, he was . . . well, just plain crazy. As far as Will had been concerned, no one in his right mind who had MacKenzie in his bed every night would want to do anything but die there that way at the age of 104. Will took great solace from the fact that, according to the studio grapevine, she hadn't dated anyone, at least not seriously, since her arrival in D.C.

For almost seven-months, he controlled himself . . . satisfied himself with casual, after-work drinks or a small bite to eat on their separate ways home. Then, finally unable to stand it any longer, he decided to find out if she had any interest in him, or failing that, have a roll in the hay and get her out of his system once and for all. He asked MacKenzie on a real date, to lunch on the train to New York and a Saturday matinee of Jersey Boys, hoping to himself that it would turn into a Saturday night at the SOHO Grand. 

She had declined. Will felt the world crashing down with an intensity that was wholly unexpected. If Will McAvoy was used to anything, it was disappointment. He simply didn't let it bother him, not ruined Christmases, or parents too drunk and bruised to see him graduate summa cum laude. But this . . . It hit so hard he could barely concentrate on what she was saying. Hell, what was she saying?

“. . . two of my oldest university friends . . . both Russians . . . and I promised ages ago that I'd read this Dostoyevsky passage that they both love . . . I can't possibly not show.”

Show where, was all Will could think to say, but that would reveal that he hadn't been listening, so he didn't say anything. Just kept what he hoped was a pleasant understanding expression on his face. 

MacKenzie had glanced at him a tad quizzically, and then continued speaking. “I have a brilliant idea! Why don't you come with me? We don't have to stay long after the service. We can put in a brief appearance at the reception and then get some dinner. Okay?” When he didn't speak immediately, her face fell. “Unless, of course, you already have the tickets. Of course, you already have the tickets . . . Jersey Boys is sold out for months. What am I thinking? I'm sure you can find someone else to go.”

“Go where with you?” Will’s brain caught up and he found his voice at last. He hoped it didn't sound as strange to MacKenzie as it did to him.

"My friends' wedding . . . where I have to read this thing in Russian for them.”

“You speak Russian?”

She smiled and nodded. “I read Russian at Cambridge.” Then, she laughed. “Luckily, I didn't have parents who reacted to the school fees with the question, ‘what in the bloody hell are you going to do with that?’ before they paid.”

“Okay,” Will had replied without further hesitation. He had just accepted going to a wedding with a woman, something he would not have done in a million years under ordinary circumstances, no matter how casual the invitation. 

“Okay? Okay, you’ll go? But the tickets . . . .”

“As you point out, it's been sold out for months, so I’m guessing it will take me about 30 seconds to dispose of two, third row, center seats for Jersey Boys.”

“Third row, center . . . .” she'd moaned, but the smile on her face told a different story.

And thus, Will and Mac’s first date had been to a wedding. Will chuckled at the thought and twisted the gold band that Mac had put on his finger to the strains of an angel voice Charlie had found at Juilliard, singing “Ave Maria.” There’s something about a wedding, he thought. The idea of two people vowing to . . . do what, Will questioned . . . just exactly what had he vowed to do in that chapel? “Do your best, Billy,” his mind answered in his wife's voice, “we each vowed to do our best with each other.” And now, the vow was expanding to do his best with his child. Will pulled back before his mind could dwell too long on the child to whom he hadn't given his best. 

More than just Dmitry and Natasha were married on that winter day in 2005, Will thought now. As Mac had promised, he'd enjoyed the Russian Orthodox ceremony and the cathedral had been beautiful. But not as beautiful as Mac was in a simple peach silk dress, reading words he could not understand. They had gotten away from the reception as quickly as possible, although only after they had both been required to down enough shots of “wodka” to incapacitate a charging rhino. 

“Food. I need food,” Mac’d said getting into the cab, clutching his hand. He couldn't remember when exactly she'd started holding his hand . . . in the church, he suspected. He loved it, he realized . . . loved the silk of her skin against his fingers and his palm. “Since this is a totally ser . . . surr . . . weird day, let's go get English pub food. I know a great place. It's Daddy’s hangout when he's in Washington. Okay?”

“Whatever you want,” he'd replied, and giving in to impulse, he kissed the top of her head. He loved the smell of her hair. She used some sort of lavender shampoo, that much he'd gotten from leaning in to look at papers she was holding, but he'd never been this close before. 

They’d been welcomed like royalty by the publican and his wife, who had looked, as Will remembered them, like characters from a Dickens’ novel, rosy, round and jolly. Speaking of royalty, Will was pretty sure that the barman had actually called Mac, “Lady MacKenzie,” before she told him that “Mac” would do fine. Will couldn't remember who had insisted that they each needed a pint to go with their pasties, but by the time the meal was concluded, he was lightheaded, not to mention, extremely impressed by Mac’s ability to hold her liquor. Will paid, and they walked, or staggered, he wasn't sure which, out onto the sidewalk.

And so, the drawing room farce began. MacKenzie, for all of her red-blooded Americanism, had spent the years between the ages of fifteen and twenty-six in the U.K. When she'd returned to the U.S., she was already in a relationship with Brenner. There are no crash courses on dating customs that one can take and there are subtle differences in practices between the two cultures. So when Mac asked Will if he would like to go to her flat instead of to a Starbucks for an after-dinner coffee, she was unaware that in America, she was signaling that she was interested in having sex with him. 

The miscommunication came to light with excruciating embarrassment, stuttering and stammering on both their parts. Will wanted to make it perfectly clear that he was not pushing himself on her (he'd already seen . . . heard. . . enough of that to last a lifetime). Under the gallantry, he was beating back despair, and trying to keep his hope alive. There had been something in her kiss . . . he hadn't made that up. He stood to go and she rose as well. She was still going on about needing to “detox” after the end of a “long, committed relationship” and saying that it wasn't that she didn't like him, because she did “very much,” it was that she was “just not ready” for “intimacy” with anyone.

He kept interrupting her, trying to get her to stop talking, stop making it worse. Finally, frustration and alcohol got the better of him and he blurted out something that was as much a non-sequitur as it was a back-handed Freudian declaration of his feelings. “Don't worry,” he'd said, “I'm not going to fall in love with you.” Just as he was contemplating where in the freezing fuck that had come from, he noticed its transformative effect on MacKenzie.

She stopped talking, turned her head slightly down and to the right and drilled those hazel eyes into him as she worried her bottom lip between her teeth. Then very slowly, she opened her mouth to speak. “The bloody hell you’re not,” she purred. Before he could process her words, Mac had launched herself at him. Her mouth was on his, warm and wet and insistent, while her hands were pulling his shirt out of his pants, his tie and jacket having been abandoned while they waited for the coffee to drip. When she succeeded in getting his shirttail out, she began moving her hands rhythmically up and down the skin on his back. Her touch was everything he had dreamed it would be. He was set on fire.

The first time was for him . . . hot, fast and thrilling. Months of pent-up passion loosed at last. He simply couldn't get enough of her fast enough to satisfy his mind’s and body’s demands. He'd tried to slow himself down, but he feared that he would come before he entered her. She seemed to understand, and, he thought, even share some of his frantic desire to merge with her, mate with her, empty himself into her. As soon as he realized that she was sufficiently slick that he couldn't possibly hurt her, he had plunged and rode the sensation to paradise.

The second time had been for MacKenzie. In slow, languid movements of lips, tongue and fingertips, he had worshiped her body . . . her feet, those glorious legs that seemed to go on forever, the trim torso and firm breasts. She’d come again and again, with his mouth and his fingers. Her body seemed to lubricate more, become more aroused with each orgasm. She had done things . . . to him, for him . . . that no other woman ever had. When finally she had convulsed violently against his face and made a throaty noise of pure animal pleasure unlike anything he had ever heard, Will felt like a god. Nothing could hurt him. Nothing could make him question himself. He was invincible as long as MacKenzie McHale wanted him this way. This time she rode him to climax, the rhythm of her body and the clutch of her muscles around him, pulling him to release.

The third time . . . Will’s throat tightened at the thought of it . . . the third time had been pure emotion. It was the forging of a tender, sacred bond that only death could attempt to sever. The third time, William Duncan had taken MacKenzie Morgan to be his wife, in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, in anger and in joy . . . forever. Everything, he realized, everything that he did after that moment, everything that she had done from that day forward, had been done in the context of that bond . . . her cheating with Brian, her attempting to move on with Wade, his cheating with Nina and the bimbo parade . . . cursing her and sending her to hell . . . all the anger and all the tears . . . the “Rudy hug,” and the Election Night firing . . . William and the child she now carried . . . all of it an unbroken continuum from that day to this.

He was so lost in his memories that he almost didn't notice his office door opening. Even then, it was her clothing that he noticed first, not her face.

“Madam President, what do you need?”

“My . . . husband . . . .” The reply was choked and breathless.

Instantly, he was on his feet, striding around his desk toward her. “My God, Kenz! What's the matter?”

She just shook her head and accepted his embrace. He could feel her shoulders rising and falling, and see the muscles in her neck working with the effort of breathing. He led her over to the sofa he'd installed in his office on Leona’s advice so Mac would have a place to nap. 

"He . . . he . . . came for . . . me . . . before . . . ."

“Who?! Pruit?” Will blurted out, thinking for an instant that someone had attacked her. She shook her head and tried again to speak. “No. Don't,” he stopped her, “Shush. It's okay, babe. Don't try to talk.”

“He didn't . . . find . . . he . . . missed me . . . .” Now each breath produced a whistling, wheezing sound.

"Just breathe, sweetheart. Don't try to talk.” He kissed the top of her head and rubbed her shoulders. Again, she shook her head.

“I . . . I . . . was gone . . . already gone.” Her eyes filled with tears. Will was sure that crying wasn't going to make breathing any easier. “Oh, Billy . . . it . . . everything . . . would have . . . been . . . different . . . .” She began to choke on her tears.

His office door opened again.

“Sorry to intrude,” Jim Harper said, stepping in without waiting for an invitation, and pulling something bright red out of his pocket. He looked studiously at Mac, then at Will. “I saw her walk through the bullpen. I brought this for her,” he continued, holding out his palm on which rested a short, red plastic tube with a silver canister peeking out from one end and a white cover on the other. “It’ll help.” He sat down on MacKenzie’s other side, while shaking the inhaler, taking off the cover and sending two sprays into the air. Then he shook it again.

"Here, Mac, four puffs. I'll do it. Breathe in on three.” She looked surprised, but appeared to be uncharacteristically cowed by his no-nonsense tone. She put her lips around the inhaler, as Jim counted, “one, two, three.” He squeezed down on the canister and she inhaled as best she could.

“Where . . .” she started to say, but Jim cut her off.

“No talking ‘till this takes effect. Ready?” he asked shaking the inhaler a second time. When Mac nodded, they repeated the process.

Will could see that she was breathing a little better after the second puff, and wasn't surprised that she insisted on talking. “Where did you . . . get that?” she asked, gesturing to the inhaler.

“I wish you'd shut up and just relax ‘till your breathing is back to normal.”

“It's . . . it's fine. Answer me.”

“From the U.S. Government. I'm sure if we shake it hard enough, some souvenir sand will fall out.” Jim smiled at Mac, who returned it with a slight one of her own. Will was struck once again by the depth of the bond between the two of them. “I brought it back ‘cause I figured you were going to chuck all of yours the minute we left Pakistani airspace,” Jim continued. “It's expired now, but it's better than nothing. I dug it out after ‘Page Six Day’ and brought it in here to keep in my desk.”

“Page six day?” Mac asked, confusion evident. Then comprehension dawned, her smile evaporated, and she closed her eyes and murmured, “Christ.”

Page six day? What the fuck was page six day, Will wondered. The only page six he could think of was the gossip column in the Post. But what would that have to do with MacKenzie, or more to the point, with Mac’s breathing issues. And what did Pakistan have to do with it? Again, he was painfully aware that he knew little about her time in the Middle East, or the suffering he'd caused. And, with that thought, it hit him. The suffering he'd caused. Page Six . . . it was the column Jim was referring to . . . Nina . . . Mac had found out about Nina by seeing a picture of them holding hands in Page Six.

“Page Six,” Will’s voice was a croak, and he cleared his throat. “What happened when you saw Page Six?”

He didn't need to elaborate as to which time she'd seen Page Six. Everyone understood the question. Mac contemplated him for a second, and then raised a hand to cup his chin. “I told you about it." He had the distinct feeling that she hadn't told him everything, that she was still . . . always . . . trying to protect him. He looked at her skeptically. "Let's just say that I don't do well when I think . . . I've lost you.” She ran out of breath by the end of her sentence, which started Jim shaking the inhaler again. “No,” she said when she saw him, “no more. I'm fine.”

“You’re not,” Jim countered, “and while you may be convinced that you can live without oxygen in your blood, I doubt if the baby feels the same way.” It was a low blow, Will thought, but effective.

Mac’s eyes grew large with concern and a flash of irritation, but she took the inhaler from Jim and used it, holding her breath longer this time to keep the bronchodilator in her lungs.

"Okay," Jim said, standing, "I'll leave you guys. I want my inhaler back,” he said pointedly to Mac, “after you use it again. Okay?” She nodded.

When Jim left, Will pulled Mac closer. “Are you okay?” He asked, running his fingers through her hair and kissing her forehead when she nodded. He wanted to ask so many things, about Pakistan, about her health, about what he'd done to her. But he steadied himself, brought himself back to the present, and concentrated on what had happened to bring her to his office on the verge of what? . . . a panic attack? “When you came in here, you said something about someone coming at you?” He asked his question quietly and gently, hoping that she could tell him without getting upset again. 

“Not at me, Billy. Coming for me . . . “ She sounded calmer, he thought with relief, although her eyes were filling with tears again at whatever it was she had to say.

Just then, his office door burst open again, and a distraught Leona Lansing crossed the threshold.

“My God, McMac!” she exclaimed, “there you are. I've been looking everywhere. What did I do? What did I say? I'm so sorry that I upset you!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies to Mr. and Mrs. Nivola for co-opting the Russian wedding story, but it was just too good to pass up.


	8. Sharing

Will watched Mac jump as Leona entered the office and hide the inhaler behind her back as if it were a syringe full of heroin. Mac immediately began speaking. “No, no, Leona . . . it wasn't anything . . . you said. It was nothing. I just . . . I had sort of an allergic reaction to something . . . I'm fine. Really.” Mac gave Leona one of the over-bright smiles she'd perfected dealing with Will’s anger and passive-aggression during her first years at ACN. 

Leona’s face was a mask of incredulity and concern. She didn't reply. She just turned that incisive stare on Will. He sighed. “Come in and sit down. What were you two talking about?” he asked. “What happened?” He felt Mac squirm and simply held her tighter until she stopped and curled her body into him for comfort, seeming to accept that the conversation was going to happen. 

“We were talking about you . . . and Charlie,” Leona began. “I started telling McMac about what an idiot you were . . . and how much of a mess you were when you got back here in ’07.” Her face softened a bit in sympathy. Will’s jaw clenched at the first clue as to what was going on. “You told Charlie that it was all fine with you, remember? You said that it wouldn't have lasted anyway, and Mac had just decided to go back to Brenner.” Mac’s head came up at that one, and although she'd heard it before, she couldn't stop herself from giving him a “what the fuck” look. 

“But Charlie only bought it for so long,” Lee continued, “partly cause you were so obviously devastated and so fucking miserable that you were next to impossible to be around. Charlie . . . “ She paused and shook her head with a fond sadness that tore at Will. In that moment, her loss was exposed, palpable and deep. Leona took a breath and continued. “ Charlie . . . Well, we all know how he is . . . was . . . when he got a bone in his teeth, and he just wouldn't let it go.”

Mac suddenly joined the conversation. “Lee told me that one morning, Charlie . . . took you out to breakfast . . . .”

“Against my better judgment . . . .” Leona interrupted.

“. . . and . . . like the expert investigative journalist . . . he was . . . broke you down . . . until you confessed.” Will heard the fondness in her voice for Charlie Skinner and for him, and knew she that if she was talking this way, she had to be doing a little better. Nonetheless, he wished she’d stop straining to speak. He saw Leona’s eyes register Mac’s wheezy breathing, but the older woman said nothing, at least not directly. Instead, she traded a quick glance with Will, and then, spoke.

“Hey, McMac, this is my story, so let me tell it.” When Mac smiled slightly and nodded, Leona continued. “He got the truth out of you,” she said to Will, “Brenner, Mac’s confession, and the fact that she'd been trying to contact you ever since the morning she’d told you. Messages, emails, texts that you were ignoring.” Will scrubbed his face with his free hand. How well he remembered that breakfast. How different Charlie’s reaction had been from his father’s. One had fanned the flames while the other had recognized that the fire was consuming him.

“That didn't sound to Charlie like she'd gone back to Brenner at all. It sounded, to use his phrase, like the whole thing was one massive clusterfuck.”

“Hear, hear,” Mac intoned like a back-bencher.

“I warned him not to get involved. Nancy told him to stay out of it. We held him back a few weeks. But Charlie was determined . . .” She looked pointedly at Will. “. . . to save your life.” Will felt Mac’s slight tremble at those words and felt like he'd been given a second clue. One that he couldn't place this time. “So,” she smiled, “without telling either of us, sometime in . . . mid-June, I'd say, Mr. Skinner went to Washington . . . in search of Mac. But, of course, by then, she'd . . . .”

He heard the words in his head: "He . . . he . . . came for . . . me . . . before . . . I . . . I . . . was gone . . . already gone.”

So that was it. Charlie had almost gotten to her in time to . . . to stop everything. “Oh, God!” Will moaned, clutching MacKenzie to him. “Oh, God, I had no idea, babe. I'm so sorry . . . so sorry.”

Leona watched as MacKenzie looked into Will’s face and then lost her composure. She lowered her head against him as her shoulders began to shake, and soft crying filled the silence. Leona heard her say faintly, “he . . . would have . . . saved . . . saved . . . .” in a gulping, breathless voice that was muffled against her husband’s chest. 

"I know. I know,” Will kept repeating, combing his fingers through his wife’s hair and tenderly stroking her shoulders, arms and back.

“Mac,” Leona said, “what hap . . . .” A quick shake of Will’s head cut her off. “Not now,” he mouthed silently and she nodded in acknowledgement. 

After a few minutes, Mac's tears turned to sniffles. Leona stood, and producing a handkerchief, walked over and handed it to her. 

“I'm sorry,” Mac started to apologize, wiping her nose and eyes, but Leona cut her off.

“Nonsense. Don't be silly. We’re all having a tough time of it this summer.” And, with that, Leona Lansing bent down, placed a kiss on MacKenzie’s forehead and left the room.

“I had no idea that Charlie went looking for you back then,” Will began, not really wanting to talk about it, but not being able to think of anything else to say.

“Let's not go there right now,” Mac said getting to her feet. “I'm going to use your bathroom to put some cold water on my eyes and see if I can make myself respectable enough that Millie won’t freak out at the sight of my face. Thank God, Pruit doesn't seem to be around this morning.”

“Well then,” Will replied smiling as gamely as he could, “if respectability’s what you’re going for, you’ll probably want to get Mrs. Lansing’s lipstick off your forehead before everyone thinks you’re having an affair with another woman.”

Will sat numbly for a few minutes after his wife emerged from the bathroom looking surprisingly respectable, kissed him, and tossing an invitation to lunch over her shoulder, left “to get to work.” He closed his eyes and wondered when the bodyblows would cease. Charlie had gone after Mac . . . Sweet Lord . . . If Nancy and Leona had not slowed him down, he might have gotten there in time. If he had, Charlie’d have taken care of Mac, given her enough to hang onto, even if he'd been a complete horse’s ass. And Charlie would have talked him down, made him grow up and take care of Mac . . . take care of his wife and baby . . . not just do his duty, Charlie would have made him see that Mac loved him . . . loved him enough to want his child . . . Charlie would have made him see that he was the one letting Brian Brenner stand in the way of the life he wanted . . . his life.

He looked at the three tickets to Saturday’s Yankees-Pirates game that Jenna had put on his desk. One each for Bo, Ned and himself. There should be four, he thought, as they began to swim before his eyes. Dear God, there should be four. And, then, although Will McAvoy would be the first to say that he did not believe in a “physical construct” of Heaven or an afterlife, he was overwhelmed by the thought that Charlie Skinner wasn't done protecting him or his family. “Have you got him, Charlie?” Will whispered. “Are you looking out for him for me?”

 

Ten minutes later, a reasonably composed Will McAvoy was knocking on Mac’s old . . . Jim’s, he corrected himself . . . office door.

“Come in.”

“Hi.” Will stuck his head in the door, and seeing that Jim was alone, entered. He’d planned to duck back out if someone had been there with Jim. He needed a little more time to prepare to see anyone else, especially, Sloan.

“She okay?” Jim looked up from the newspaper he was reading as a Will came in.

“Yeah. I think so.” As okay as she's going to be right now, Will thought. He sat down in the visitor’s chair, and put the inhaler on Jim’s desk. “What’s the story on this?” he asked.

This time the look that always crossed Jim’s face when asked to talk about MacKenzie lasted only a split second. Well, there’s progress, Will observed, I'm starting to be trusted. “Sand,” Jim replied. “Her airways react . . . get inflamed and she gets a . . . bronchospasm from breathing sand particles . . . and stress, if it's bad enough, and a few other things . . . but sand’s the worst. We kind of learned that the hard way.” Jim glanced at Will. “This stuff,” he continued, picking up the inhaler and putting it in his desk drawer, “relaxes the muscles around the bronchioles that tighten up when a reaction starts.”

"Sand! Seriously? She’s allergic to sand and she spent three fucking years over there breathing it in!”

“Two and a half . . . ” Jim started to correct when suddenly, he felt very defensive, defensive of Mac, defensive of their work in the Middle East, and just plain defensive. “I don't know, Billy, you tell me what sins she was in that hellhole atoning for!”

Not cheating with Brian, Will realized. Not even Mac’s overdeveloped sense of responsibility or desire to justify his insane reaction went that far. She’d put what she'd done with Brian in perspective . . . somewhat in perspective . . . even back then. Will closed his eyes. Why hadnt he been there to comfort her? If he'd listened to the messages. Charlie’d pushed him to listen to and read them, but he was too stubborn. Or was it that he'd feared that would hurt too much? Even if he'd gotten there after it happened, he could have comforted her, prevented this atonement.

“And . . . she . . . we . . . did good work . . . those were important stories she got out,” Jim finished, some of his defensiveness evaporating at the expression of pain on Will’s face.

“Yes. Yes, you did, and yes, they were. She saw a doctor for it . . . the breathing . . . over there?” Will asked.

“Sort of,” Jim snorted. “You know Mac and doctors. I've got to say this, Will, you can be a real asshole sometimes, but you may have met your match in your wife when it comes to medical issues. I've never known anyone so adverse to admitting that she’s sick, or in any way less than 100% than MacKenzie.” 

Will smiled and thought about a time in Washington, when he'd had to threaten to tie Mac to the bed to get her to stay home and rest even though she had a major case of the flu, was vomiting constantly and running a temperature of 103. “Yeah, I hear you. So, what happened with the sand?”

“Well, it started with her coughing. We all were, really. We were in Iraq at the time. Out in the rural areas, sand blows there like nothing you’ve ever seen. When we were in buildings . . . most of them, even the temporary ones, had some kind of air filtration system, so after she'd been inside for a while, it got better. She didn't seem so breathless and the cough would go away . . . sort of. I asked her about it, and of course, she said it was nothing. But she did say that she knew it would go away because all her life she’d sometimes cough and get the same feeling in her chest when she ran in cold weather, but she was surprised that it was happening where it was so hot.” Jim paused, and a look of fond, and sad, recollection claimed his face. “Later, Monk . . . we’ve told you about him . . . Monk called me the village idiot not to have recognized that she was describing mild intermittent asthma.”

It didn't surprise Will. What he'd seen in his office had sure looked like an asthma attack to him. One of his basketball buddies, Tom Prescott, whom Mac had actually met at the reception, had asthma and would occasionally have to come off the court during a practice. Didn't stop Tom though. Asking Mac about this is going to be fun, Will thought, and that thought somehow led to the realization that apparently, Jim had shared Mac with Monk far more easily than he managed to share her with him. Of course, Jim never saw Monk deliberately hurting Mac, either. Not like him with the bimbos parading through the bull pen. . . and Nina . . . Christ! Nina! How could he have done that to MacKenzie?

“Back when I was torturing Mac, did you recognize that I loved her?” Jim seemed to jump back to the present with a jolt at the segue-less question. He looked contemplatively at Will, as if weighing the answer. 

“She did,” Jim finally replied. “Although most of the time, you didn't give her much to go on. Sometimes, it was just that she couldn't bring herself to believe that you'd forgotten or no longer wanted everything you guys had before.”

Everything, Will thought, yes, they’d had everything . . . so much . . . so much more than he'd known. With a sharp intake of breath, he experienced the depth of the plunge Mac must have taken from finding out that she was pregnant . . . that they'd “made a baby,” as she was fond of saying now . . . to where he'd put her that winter morning . . . writhing on the floor of his foyer.

“But, sometimes,” Jim continued sending his boyish smile in Will's direction, “there were moments like when you were in the hospital or nights at Hang Chews, when the shield of assholeness with which you attempted to guard against her would slip a little . . . I guess on Election Night, your arm just got fucking tired of holding that thing up, uh? . . . and then, anyone could see that you two were completely . . . connected . . . married . . . intimate.” The last observation although his, predictably embarrassed Jim, who quickly cleared his throat and changed the subject.

“Anyway, back to the sand. About a month and a half in, we went out with the unit for a couple of weeks on maneuvers and reconnaissance . . . you know . . . sleeping in tents.” Sometimes, Will wondered if Jim said “you know” like that to remind him that he didn't know . . . that he didn't have the first fucking idea about Mac’s life in those years. “She started to get bad. A couple of times, she even drafted Paul . . . remember Paul Herriott? . . . from D.C.? She got Paul to do the reporting and voice-over for the footage cause she couldn't stop coughing and you could hear a wheeze on the tape when she exhaled. Then, one night, after we made camp, we got hit with a real sandstorm. Some of the particles were so small and were hitting the canvas so hard that they came through. The next morning, there was this fine yellowish dust on everything inside that hadn't moved around during the night.” Jim reached for the bottle of water on his desk and took a sip, as if talking about the desert had made him thirsty. Either that, Will thought, or he was fortifying himself for what was to come.

“I woke up in the middle of the night and saw her sitting up in her bag. She had her arms straight and was like supporting herself on her hands, with her head kind of forward and her shoulders hunched really high.” Jim demonstrated, lowering and sort of bobbing his head between his shoulders, opening his mouth and panting. “She was taking really fast breaths like that and her eyes were big . . . there was no bullshit about it this time . . . she was scared. She tried, but she couldn't talk. Very little air was going into or out of her lungs. She wasn't really wheezing even, just this slight high pitched whistle that you had to strain to hear.

“I ran for Monk, who was the unit commander . . . we didn't know him that well then . . . and described what was happening with her. He called the medic and said it was asthma and she needed a nebulizer and oxygen and stuff. Then he came back to the tent with me and sat with her up against him, talking to her in this calm, soft voice, till the medic got there. They put oxygen in her nose and started her on a nebulizer with albuterol, that's a fast acting bronchodilator, and then gave her salbutamol and prednisone by IV.” Jim smiled ruefully. “It was a bad night. It took hours on that stuff for her just to sound like she did this morning in your office . . . days to really get over it. After that, she took some pills for a while and had an inhaler that she was supposed to use twice a day and this kind . . . “ Jim gestured to the drawer, “ . . . for when she started coughing or wheezing a lot. Once in a while, if she was really stressed and it was particularly sandy, I'd get the medic at night cause she needed the nebulizer. But, it was never like that first time.” Jim looked earnestly at Will. “If I had a thousand bucks for every time she's scared the shit out of me, I could retire.”

“And it was worse in the summer . . . in June?” It was sort of a question, but one Will was sure he knew the answer to since Jim had said, and he had seen, that stress was one of her triggers.

“Yeah,” Jim confirmed. “I don't envy you, but, you know,” Jim cleared his throat and this time said something that Will did know, “after this morning, her OB needs to be told about this.” Will only nodded.

 

As Will walked across the bull pen back to his office, Jenna shouted at him, “Mrs. Lansing called you,” in a voice that conveyed that the bull pen staff had not yet completely recovered from her unprecedented morning visit. 

I'll bet, Will thought, but just smiled and waived his acknowledgment to his Assistant.

He sat down at his desk and dialed the number. “Hi, Barbara,” he said when the voice of Leona’s long-time assistant answered. “It's Will. Is she available?” Will was told that he might have to wait, but within seconds, Leona’s voice filled his ear.

“Will, what is going on? Is MacKenzie alright?”

“Yes, she's okay . . . sort of . . . .”

“What the fuck does that mean? We were talking pleasantly and she just came undone . . . like you saw her . . . couldn't catch her breath . . . ran out of my office without a word . . . after I mentioned that Charlie had gone to Washington back in ’07 trying to find her.”

“Listen, Lee, I can't tell you much right now without breaching confidences.” Will sighed, trying to think what he could safely say. “Hearing that about Charlie was unnerving because Mac thinks . . . and rightly so . . . that if Charlie had gotten to her in time . . . she wouldn't have gone to the Middle East, and certain things that happened wouldn't have happened.” Jesus! That sounded lame.

“This isn't about the stabbing?”

“No. Something else.” 

“Something worse?”

“Infinitely worse.”

Leona Lansing was silent for a long time. Will couldn't see her face, but he'd been in enough meetings with her to know that she was weighing whether to speak. Finally, she did.

“Charlie feared . . . always thought . . . that Mac . . . that Mac had been raped over there.”

“What! Lee! Why? No!” Will sputtered.

“He always said,” Leona answered softly, “that there was a trauma in there . . . a profound sadness . . . visible when you looked in Mac’s eyes . . . that neither the stabbing nor your rejecting her could explain. He thought maybe . . . . It really tore him up . . . .” She drifted off.

“Charlie . . . .” Will's voice started to crack with emotion. “Charlie was always the perceptive one. No, she wasn't raped.” He swallowed hard and tried to continue. “I'm sorry . . . “ he choked again. “I'm sorry that he believed that . . . and it upset him.” Will paused again. “But, maybe it was for the best, Lee, because the truth . . . the truth . . . would have broken his heart.” Leona heard a muffled sob.

“Will . . . Will?"

“I've got to go,” he said rapidly, his voice choking with tears. “You have to let me . . . I . . . I can't . . . I have to have lunch with Mac . . . I . . . please, please . . . .”

Will hung up the phone with the words, “anything . . . anything I can do . . . just call” in his ears. 

 

Since returning from Will’s office, Mac had forced herself to concentrate on work and had accomplished a number of small nagging tasks like returning email and checking ratings. While the latter was one of her least favorite things to do, she had to admit that News Night’s . . . Billy’s . . . post-incarceration popularity did give her a thrill. Yes, she thought, she was definitely feeling better. She took a few deep breaths to confirm it, and glanced at her watch. She'd call Will and set up meeting for lunch in half an hour. That way he'd have plenty of time to get back to the afternoon rundown. Maybe she'd sit in on it too. Charlie used to on occasion. But then, Charlie hadn’t just stopped being the EP. The couple times she'd tried to join in the past, everyone, including, or maybe especially, Jim, had immediately started deferring to her as if she were still Will’s EP. She'd tried to make a joke of it, patting her belly and telling them all that “the only thing I'm Executive Producing these days is little McAvoy here.” Yeah, why not, she thought, she'd give it another go. 

After arranging to meet Will, she still had almost twenty-five minutes before she had to be downstairs. Rather than start in on another task she would have to interrupt, she decided to pay an unscheduled visit on Reese. If he was busy, she decided, she’d just go down and talk “baby stuff” with the staff in the bull pen. That was always an upper. 

“Hey, Mac!” Reese said as she was ushered into his office. “This is a pleasant surprise.”

“Reese, do you remember that Saturday morning that we spent on my bathroom floor when Will was in jail?” At Reese’s double-take, she mentally relayed her own words, and they both burst out laughing.

“Only you, MacKenzie Morgan McHale McAvoy would lead with a line like that,” he said, still chuckling. “You'd better pray that this office isn't bugged by Page Six.” He raised his hands as if reading a headline on a billboard, and altered his voice to sound like Ed Herlihy narrating a World War II newsreel. “‘Is McAvoy baby really a Lansing?’”

“If there's one thing I can say for certain, it's that this baby isn't a Lansing!” There was something odd in the conviction in her tone that took Reese back to fact that she'd come in here talking about that day in June when he'd arrived at her door fresh from finding out . . . having his suspicions confirmed . . . that Charlie Skinner was his father in every way.

“So what about bathroom day did you want to discuss?” His voice conveyed that his recollection of that morning, being there with Mac, talking, singing and hugging, was a time he treasured.

“You asked me something like had I ever asked myself why Arthur Lansing didn't include all of his children in his stock trust,” she replied. “I have asked myself, and I have my answer,” Mac said, looking like a school girl with her shoulders straight and an expectant smile in her eyes.

“And, your answer is?” Something clutched in Reese’s throat.

“My answer is that he did.”

“What?” Reese was confused. He thought she'd figured it out, but this made no sense. Of course, Lansing hadn't included him . . . there’d be no problem . . . .

“He did,” Mac reconfirmed, seeing Reese’s confusion. “Arthur did include all of his children in the trust.” Her eyes and her voice softened. “The problem for us is that he didn't include any of Charlie Skinner’s children.”

Oh, clever girl. Reese grinned. “Ding! Ding! Ding! Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner! I presume Mrs. McAvoy that you worked this out on your own and my mother didn't tell you.”

“No, sir. Completely on my own.” She smiled fondly at the look of pride on Reese’s face. “And, it wasn't exactly neuroscience. You gave me a whopping big clue when you said that the stock was hush money. Only a couple of things would merit a pay-off like that. Sex, drugs and rock and roll, as they say. Besides, I finally figured out what it was about your eyes . . . .”

“They’re not blue . . . .”

“What? Blue?” Mac looked confused.

“Arthur Lansing’s eyes were blue.”

“They were? I didn't realize that,” she said, remembering some of her basic genetics and the fact that Leona’s eyes were a grey-blue. “Well,” she giggled, “how inconsiderate of him. I say . . .” she made her accent more formal and pronounced, “that's not holding up his end of the bargain at all.” Reese laughed. “I'm glad you’re happy about it,” Mac continued. “Charlie . . . he’s something to live up to . . . God knows I'm trying . . . .” She studied Reese closely. “You’re going to look more and more like him as time passes, you know, so it’s good . . . .” Suddenly, she changed course. “Do you know what happened? . . . to . . . your parents, I mean?”

"Yes,” he responded, surprising her. “Charlie wrote me a letter. You can read it if you like. Nancy gave it to me, along with some of Charlie’s things . . . jewelry and . . . .” He gestured toward the side table where Charlie Skinner’s cut crystal whiskey decanter and four matching glasses were prominently displayed. 

“Nancy knew?” Mac tried to keep from sounding incredulous and really when she thought about it, it didn't seem that strange. “The girls?” 

Reese nodded. “Nancy and Sophie are fine with it and Katy . . . well, Katy’s Katy.”

“And you, how do you feel about it getting out . . . going public?”

“I'd rather it not . . . for a lot of reasons, none of which has to do with being ashamed to be Charlie's son.” He said the last words proudly. “But inside the family . . . you can tell Will if you haven't already . . . I'm finding that sharing something I've kept hidden for years . . . my knowledge, or at least my suspicions . . . is . . . I don't know . . . a really liberating experience.”

“Well,” she said, looking at her watch and seeing that she needed to go down to meet Will, “funny you should say that since the benefits of sharing a secret seems to be my life lesson of the week.”


	9. Conversation With Catherine, Part I

“I do? Seriously, Billy? I think that by not talking about something I can make it go away. You’re the guy who told Charlie that it was fine with you that I'd decided to go back to Brian bloody Brenner!” 

Will knew that the outrage in her voice was only half-serious, at least, he hoped it was only half serious. They were dressing for their appointment with Catherine Barrington, and Will was pretty much babbling about almost anything to distract Mac from thinking too much about telling Catherine about William’s birth. So, he'd dived right in and brought up the need to tell Dr. Barrington about Mac’s breathing issues. She had predictably balked at the idea and downplayed the seriousness of the attack in his office the day before. He had accused her of being an ostrich about certain things, and pretending that if they are not spoken of, they will magically go away.

“Do you remember that Monday morning after our first . . . ahem . . . date? Will asked with an exaggerated clearing of his throat. “You suggested that we never . . . .”

“Our first date? You mean Dim’s and Tasha’s wedding?” his wife interrupted.

“You can't need clarification,” Will responded in mock outrage. “There’s no way you could have forgotten our first day . . . and night together.”

“No, Billy, you’re right. There's no way I could forget.” She smiled up at him lovingly, and then dropped all expression from her face. “You left me in the middle of the bloody night.”

“More like the middle of the morning, but, yeah, that was a very bad idea.” 

He touched her hair and the side of her face, just because he could. He could touch her anytime he wanted because she wanted him. Her desire was intoxicating. He clearly remembered awakening that first Sunday morning in Washington and staring in amazement at her sleeping there so peacefully and childlike, the woman who had taught him the ecstasy that only love could produce. Then, he'd been suddenly terrified of the realization that he loved her, and had no idea how she felt about him. What if the night had just been about sex for her? He'd always hated the awkwardness of the morning after . . . when the sex was over. What if she did too? What if she didn't want to wake up and find him in her bed? What if that would ruin everything? And so, he'd found a little pad of paper in the kitchen that she’d taken from a room at the George V in Paris and written her a note . . . five, actually . . . the first four he'd taken with him crumpled in his pocket . . . that he'd hoped had set the right tone of casual bonhomie.

She had been devastated when she’d awakened and found that he had gone. The only thing that she could imagine would motivate such rudeness was that he didn't want to see her in the daylight, that he'd been disgusted by the things they had done, by her desires and her needs. The note had been pleasant enough. He'd promised to call. But she chocked that up to his Nebraska farm boy manners kicking in at the last minute. If he really wanted to see her he'd have just stayed and been there when she awakened. No, he'd regretted the night, she was sure of that. And what did she expect, losing control like that, doing everything she'd ever dreamed of doing to a man, or with a man. It had alienated Will. Like Brian, a little voice in her head kept repeating. It was different . . . because Brian had always controlled their sex . . . but your intensity’s scared Will away all the same, just like you did Brian.

And what kind of person am I, she asked herself, to be this drawn to Will, to anyone who wasn't Brian. Hadn't she been sure that she wanted to spend her life making Brian happy, or at least trying to, she admitted ruefully. But hadn't she been sure that she loved Brian, that it was deep and lasting, even after he rejected her. She'd hoped, she had to admit to herself, when a few pictures of her having dinner with Will had made it into the gossip rags that Brian would see them and be jealous . . . no, not jealous . . . would see them and realize that he still loved her and wanted her. She'd known that Will was attracted to her. His lingering glances that turned into stares when he thought no one was looking had told her that. And he was attractive and brilliant, but until yesterday, MacKenzie had felt that she understood her feelings and remained committed to working things out with Brian if at all possible. 

But now . . . now, she was unsettled and unsure of herself. What had happened to her that she could want Will like she had last night . . . she wouldn't admit to herself that she still wanted him the same way now in the cold light of day, or that she had never wanted Brian that way. She tried to blame it on the amount of alcohol that she'd consumed, and actually succeeded for a few hours, but then thoughts of Will would surface again and the ache in her gut would return . . . the ache that told her that it wasn't just booze, that she wanted him in her life, and that last night, she'd destroyed something precious . . . just as she had done with Brian.

But she didn't have to work with Brian! MacKenzie’s blood ran cold. She would have to see Will again on Monday . . . oh, God! . . . tomorrow . . . and five days a week for the foreseeable future! For a fleeting instant, she thought about calling in sick . . . or just disappearing. But of course the latter would tank her career and the former would just make things worse by prolonging the tension, adding to her embarrassment. She needed to confront what had happened, the Ambassador instructed in her brain. That much was certain. She could feel the heat of mortification rising in her cheeks. Well, she had the rest of the day, she'd told herself. She would have to think of a way to regain some dignity and return to a working relationship with Will McAvoy. 

True to his word, Will did call that afternoon, twice. And four times Sunday evening. All of the calls went straight to voicemail. By 1:00 am, Will was distraught and desperate enough to take an over-the-counter sleeping pill, despite the fact that his head was still pounding out a wicked hang-over. His hyper-active brain just laughed, and went on working. Was she sick? Had something happened to her? Had he pushed her too fast . . . too far? It hadn’t seemed that way. It had seemed as if they were perfectly matched, desire for desire. But now? Why didn't she want to talk to him? Did she regret what had happened? What else could it be?

And then she had come into the studio the next day, pale and tense and avoiding him at all costs. He’d worked to start suppressing his emotions, his vulnerability, and if there was one thing that Will McAvoy had mastered in life, it was suppression of himself. His life had depended on it. It's okay, he told himself. Okay, so it was a one-off . . . a great fuck . . . one of the best . . . but that was it. He could . . . would . . . be fine with that. He was beginning to wonder if they would ever speak again, when he watched her screw up her courage and ask to have a word with him. He’d made damn sure that the word was had in his office. He’d walked in ahead of her and stood behind his desk . . . the power position . . . and lit a cigarette, even though Mac loathed the habit, so his hands could be in motion and she wouldn't see them shaking. 

She seemed nervous as she began by apologizing for getting so “pissed” Saturday night, but assured him that she thought that they could “restore a mutually beneficial and proper working relationship” by focusing solely on their “relative roles in the production of the broadcast” and “ceasing any social contact.” What the fuck? It sounded like a speech to Parliament. But he couldn't ignore that the essence of it was that MacKenzie McHale didn't want to have anything to do with him except what CNN paid her to do.

His resolve to have no reaction faltered. He fought down panic. No! No! He wanted to scream! Why was she doing this? What had happened? Why? Just as he was spiraling off into a defensive seizure, he saw her. Not imagined her or projected her, but saw her. She wasn't in control. She was shaking. Frightened. Childlike. Beseeching him for something he couldn't put his finger on, but something he was quite sure he wanted to give her if it was in his power. He wanted to reassure her, take away her obvious discomfort. Will forgot himself in the desire to help MacKenzie. And, not knowing what she wanted, he gave what he had . . . a little humor to bring her back from the edge and . . . himself. He stubbed out the cigarette, and walked from behind his desk.

“You want me to . . . you want us to not talk about anything other than the show, and really not talk at all outside of the context of producing the show? Have I got that right?” he asked. That was succinctly put, Mac thought. He seemed to be serious, although frankly, her proposal sounded a little ridiculous when it was laid out like that. But she nodded.

“Okay. Okay, I'm ready to agree. I think I can get behind this vow of silence business once I get the hang of it. As long as,” he said these words slowly, as he took another step closer, and bent his head a little to try to get a look into her eyes, which were studiously focused on her shoes. Now she could see his shoes as well. “As long as it doesn't apply while I'm making love to you.”

His voice was . . . she didn't have words for how his voice sounded in that moment. She had never heard anyone speak of making love to her in a tone like that before. Not having sex with her . . . not fucking her . . . Christ! . . . he was talking about loving her. Again, she felt the new sensation of disloyalty to Brian . . . or maybe it was disloyalty to her feelings for Brian . . . or . . . . She swallowed hard as Will's hand reached for the little dimple in her chin, and raised her face. His touch was electric, a jolt that ran straight to her core.

“Kenz,” he whispered. Another first! He had started calling her Kenz sometime during their night together. She had never been Kenz to anyone, but she knew completely that Kenz was the essence of who she was. “I'm in,” he told her, his voice quiet and deep. “Wherever this takes us, I'm in.”

“You . . . didn't stay, and I thought . . . I thought . . . .” And then, she couldn't think because his mouth was teasing her bottom lip from between her opening teeth, and she was sinking into the softest, safest place she had ever known. 

 

Seven and a half years later, they sat in Catherine Barrington’s office. Even though it wasn't time for Mac’s regularly scheduled check-up, the doctor had suggested that as long as they were there, “we might as well have a look” at the fetus. During the ultrasound, Catherine announced that she was ready to make an “educated prediction” of the baby’s gender, and asked them if they wanted to know “or just be surprised.” They'd seemed stunned by the question so Catherine had suggested that they discuss it while Mac was getting dressed. As her “bump” grew, Will had observed that Mac had abandoned “it” (“makes me feel like the Alien from the film is going to pop out through my chest”) and started using both gender specific pronouns, depending on her mood, but most of the time, Will noticed, Mac said, “she.” 

“Okay,” Will said when they'd seated themselves in Catherine's office, “we want to know.”

“It's a girl,” Catherine announced.

“Thank God!” Will breathed in a way that made the doctor peer at him over her reading glasses.

“That’s wonderful!” Mac clapped her hands. We’re no where with boys’ names, other than Charles in there somewhere, but we’re in agreement about the first name, Charlotte.” Mac tightened the arm that she'd instinctively wrapped around her abdomen, and said, “Hello, Charlotte, it's Mummy.”

After a few more minutes discussing the relative value of having one’s first child be female. Dr. Barrington changed the subject to ask the reason they were all there. “So everything seems to be normal. What did you want to see me about?” She looked expectantly at her patient and then at Will. Neither spoke.

After the silence had extended beyond the tolerable and Mac still had not said anything, Will volunteered that “Mac’s having breathing issues,” deciding on the spur of the moment to start with the most benign of the two topics they needed to cover. “She’s been under a lot of stress with the new job and Charlie’s death, and she's had a couple of nightmares and a daytime episode where she has trouble breathing.”

“What kind of trouble, Mac?” Catherine asked pointedly. There could be no doubt about whom she expected to respond.

"Um, . . . well, . . . sometimes it's that I start hyperventilating . . . like a panic attack . . . and, sometimes it's just that, and it goes away when I calm down . . . but other times it goes into . . . I start coughing and can't stop . . . and then I can't catch my breath, and my chest tightens.”

“Do you hear wheezing?”

"Yes," Will answered, figuring that that question was directed to him as well. Mac just nodded.

"More when you breathe in or out.”

“Not in, really. Mostly, out,” Mac answered.

"And this just started recently? You’ve never had this before now?”

Will figured that this one was back to Mac, so he just waited. “No. I mean . . . how many negatives do we have going here? Yes, it's happened before. It just doesn't happen a lot . . . or didn't until . . . “ She glanced at Will.

“When in the past did you get episodes of coughing and wheezing?”

“I guess that first times I noticed it was when I was a child and I'd run in the cold, especially if it was also damp or foggy. It got better as I got older. Sometimes when I'd run or go skiing it would happen, but it would just go away after a little while.”

“That’s it? You've never been prescribed an inhaler or other medication?”

Mac shook her head. “Sometimes when I was little, if it bothered me a lot, I'd sneak a puff or two off of Greer’s or Tommy’s puffers . . . .”

“Greer and Tommy are?” Dr. Barrington asked, although from the way MacKenzie said their names, she assumed they were siblings.

“My younger sister and brother.”

“So, you have two siblings who were diagnosed with asthma, but you hid yours from your parents?” Catherine sounded to Will’s ears both slightly incredulous and amused. 

Mac just nodded, and said, “I guess that's what it was.”

“So, were the puffs you’d sneak as a kid the last time you used an inhaler?”

"No, actually, I used one a few . . . yesterday, actually.”

This cat and mouse game that Mac seemed to be playing was driving Will nuts. “And before,” he interjected, addressing his wife, “about a year ago, when Jim brought the inhaler into the office, you used it then, didn't you?”

“No,” she replied, turning to look at him, “Jim thought that he heard me wheezing, and I guess I was a little . . . .”

“For how long?” Will asked. Dr. Barrington started slightly at the intensity of his voice.

“I don't know . . . a few days . . . a week.”

“You walked around unable to breathe properly for a week?” Will’s voice was, if anything, even more tense and agitated.

“I was okay, Billy. It didn't last.” Mac sounded equally distressed to Catherine's ears. “I got over it, alright?” Will continued to stared at her, unconvinced. “Really, Billy,” Mac said, speaking more quickly and squirming as his eyes bored into her. “Really, I was alright. Sloan made me take Xanax, and that helped . . . .”

Mac froze, then quickly turned her head away, her lower lip first catching in her teeth and then being expelled to form the word, “fuck,” which she whispered under her breath. Catherine Barrington watched as Will’s face registered in turn, surprise, incredulity, horror and finally guilt. 

What had she been going through, he asked himself. Sloan? Xanax? He'd heard it before, but suddenly the idea that MacKenzie McHale would swallow a psychotropic drug was beyond his imagination. Where had Sloan gotten the Xanax that she'd given to Mac? Because of him. Because he'd . . . Christ! That's why she'd seemed so calm about Nina, so unaffected that he'd been sure she didn't care anymore . . . no! He'd told himself that to justify what he was doing, but he'd never believed that she didn't care about him any longer. He looked down, studying his hands, asking himself again the question that seemed to have no answer, what had he been doing with Nina? Besides hurting the woman he loved. Jesus, what kind of a first class shumuck was he?

“Billy.” Mac reached for his hand. “Remember when Dr. Habib said that I was not responsible for your reaction to my confession about Brian.” Mac waited a beat to see if he would respond. When he continued to just stare at their joined hands, she continued, “well, it's equally true that you are not responsible for my reaction to your relationship with Nina.” Now Will turned remorse-ridden eyes in her direction as if he were going to argue, but before he could say anything, Mac squeezed his hand and said, “come on, we’er wasting Catherine’s time.” He nodded, just a slight dip of his head, and she turned back to the doctor, still clutching Will’s hand.

“So,” she said taking a deep breath and control of the conversation, “as I said, I’ve gone along fine most of my life. The only exception was in the Middle East. It seems that I'm very allergic to sand of all things. I had a bad episode once when we were caught in a sandstorm.” She paused and Will wondered if she were going to say more since “bad episode” didn't seem to begin to describe the situation Jim had told him about. “I was embedded there for almost two and a half years and I did need to use . . . take some medication to deal with it.” Mac smiled and looked from Catherine to Will. “I promise you both, the first report of a sandstorm approaching New York, and I'm out of here.”

“What medication did you use over there?” Catherine asked.

“Salbutamol . . . I mean albuterol . . . .”

“In a MDI?”

“Yes.” Out of the corner of her eye, Mac glanced at Will, who was looking at her pointedly in a manner that caused her to make a mental note to have a word with Jim about his big mouth. “And, at first . . . the bad time, I mentioned . . . and a few times after that . . . the medics gave it to me through a nebulizer.”

Catherine Barrington’s eyebrows went up slightly. “This first time, how long were you on the nebulizer?”

“I don't remember exactly . . . a few hours . . . five, six . . . and then every four hours for a while . . . a couple of days.”

“What else did they do for you?” Catherine’s voice was extremely light and even, which Will thought was designed to conceal concern.

“They gave me oxygen and other things . . . a steroid and something else . . . in an IV.”

“And, after that, did you do anything except use a short acting beta-argonist on an as needed basis?”

"A couple of times . . . twice, I think . . . I took prednisone for a week or so.” Mac wrinkled her nose like the memory itself was distasteful. Catherine shook her head at her medicine-adverse patient and wondered what was going on in Iraq or Afghanistan important enough for Mac to take an oral steroid in order to stay there. “They gave me Advair,” Mac continued, and something in a pill. But really, Catherine, I've been fine since I got back to the states.”

“And I believe you, Mac. What strength Advair? Do you remember?” Catherine asked, rising from her chair and beckoning Will and Mac to follow her. 

"500 and then 250."

“Twice a day?” Mac nodded. “And the pill, was it called Accolate?” Mac nodded again. “I’m sure you are fine now, Mac. But from the sound of it, you’ve had at least one life-threatening asthma exacerbation, and you admit that you’ve had some wheezing and shortness of breath these last few weeks. I'd be remiss in my care of you and . . . Charlotte, if I didn't check you out.”

When they were finished in the exam room and were seated once again back in Catherine’s office, she looked at her notes and spoke, “so, Mac, you sound pretty good. I picked up a slight wheezing at the very end of your expiratory breaths, especially when you were using the peak flow meter. Your highest reading was a little under the predicted norm for you age, height and weight, but 379’s not bad, and your oxygen saturation reading was 98 and that’s fine. I'm going to write you three scrips . . . . I can see from the expression on your face, you’re getting ready to resist me,” the doctor chuckled as Mac schooled her expression into one of neutrality, “but hear me out first, okay?” Mac nodded obediently.

“The first one is for a rescue inhaler . . . albuterol. This one you must fill. Now. On your way to wherever you’re going from here. Better yet, give me the name of a pharmacy that's convenient for you and I'm going to call it in.” Will spoke up quickly, supplying the information. “I'm going to order two. You both should carry one at all times. And use it any time . . . “ Catherine looked at Mac, “you’re not breathing normally, or . . . “ now the piecing grey eyes fell on Will, “. . . you see her breathing rapidly or you hear a wheeze when she talks.” She turned back to Mac, still in no-nonsense mode, “MacKenzie, it's important that you don't let your breathing get bad. Stop a flare-up as soon as possible.” She paused. Mac seemed frozen, visibly stifling her protests having agreed to hear Catherine’s reasoning. The doctor dialed the pharmacy and placed the order.

“As you will no doubt discover, albuterol is a Class C drug.” Dr. Barrington gave a slight shake of her head as Will started to go for the smartphone from his pocket, and proceeded to explain the classification system for drug use in pregnant women. “Class C is usually as good as it gets in drug ratings. The vast majority . . . most . . . of the medicine that pregnant women consume is Class C, and no one can trace a bad outcome to any of them.”

“So use the rescue inhaler when you need it, Mac.” She waited until Mac nodded her agreement. “You’re through the first trimester. It's not going to hurt anything. In fact albuterol has been used to stop pre-term labor because the uterus is the same sort of smooth muscle tissue as that which wraps the airways in your lungs. So use it.” Catherine repeated, pointing a finger at Mac. “What will hurt Charlotte is for your oxygen saturation levels to dip below 94-95%.”

“I understand,” Mac sighed resignedly.

“Okay, basically, other than an extreme sensitivity to sand . . .”

“Blowing sand,” Mac corrected. “I think I'll be able to play in the sandbox, but deserts are certainly not the place for me.” Then she winced, wondering how Will would interpret that remark, and her mind returned to the subject they had made the appointment to discuss.

Catherine shook her head slowly. “Sand. Who would have thought? Anyway, other than sand, it sounds like you’ve got mild intermittent asthma that is mostly exercise, cold air and stress induced. Now the objective of treating you is not to respond to and get you out of breathing difficulties, it's to keep you from having them triggered in the first place. What’s interesting is that we have two drugs that when used together are very effective in preventing flare-ups, and that are actually rated Class B for pregnancy . . . until Will gets up to speed on the subject, I'll tell you that Class B are drugs that have been used widely in pregnancy for a very long time and have been shown to be safe in trials. In this case, if some link were shown between these drugs and a poor pregnancy outcome, all the OB-GYN’s and pulmonary care physicians in this country would drop over in a dead faint.”

Mac smiled. But Will could see that she was still clearly unhappy about the prospect of taking any sort of medicine. Will could understand that as he'd basically sworn off meds since Mac and Lonny had found him on the bathroom floor, or more precisely, since the day, a few months later, when MacKenzie had stepped into his office and told him that she didn't care what else he ever did as long as he never pulled a stunt like that again. He’d gaped at her, not knowing how to respond, ashamed of himself, until her composure had slipped, and tears had started down her face. He'd watched impassively as MacKenzie had pleaded, as if for her life, “please, please, I beg of you, don't do that to me again . . . . Please, Billy, please let me die first . . . Please let me die first . . . “ and then she'd fled. 

And he hadn’t gone after her. Why? He remembered wanting desolately to have had things be different. But he hadn't been able to move. He hadn't been able to stop shredding the damn paper. Why had he thought himself so powerless? Not fear of rejection. Mac was right. When she'd fit her body to his in the “Rudy Hug,” she'd told him, “we’re home, Billy. This is home.”

“. . . Budesonide,” Catherine was saying to Mac when Will rejoined the conversation. “It's a corticosteroid, but luckily, inhaling it, thereby putting it directly on the lungs, is more akin to rubbing cortisone on your skin than to sending it through your digestive tract and into your bloodstream. It's much less toxic than the prednisone you were taking so you could stay on the ground over there.” Once again she gave Mac that pointed, no nonsense look over her reading glasses. “Prednisone’s got lots of nasty side effects, especially in repeated and long-term use. Budesonide is essentially like the Advair the medics gave you, but Advair is considered Class C, not B. Budesonide is as safe as cortisone cream, and I'll bet that even you, Mac, think nothing of rubbing cortisone cream on raw or itchy skin.”

“I'm not a lunatic, Catherine. I just have a heathy skepticism . . . alright, mistrust . . . of the pharmaceutical industry.”

Dr. Barrington smiled and nodded. "Along with inhaled budesonide, which is marketed as Pulmicort, I’m going to prescribe monolukast which is a nightly pill that blocks your immune system’s over-active response to triggers like pollens, cold and stress. They are both Class B.”

“Are there any Class A medicines?”

"Almost none that I can think of . . . some of the topical vaginal yeast treatments . . . folic acid . . . water . . . “ Mac laughed at the joke. “Nothing to treat asthma,” Catherine went on. “Mac, I wasn't kidding, most of the medicines that I prescribe for my pregnant patients are Class C,” Catherine gave Mac a bright smile, “and I do sleep at night.” Mac returned the smile and then looked slightly embarrassed.

“I'm sorry. I can be such an arse about medical issues, I know. I don't know why, I just hate being sick or taking medicine.”

“Well, since I know you are resisting the idea of taking medicine, let me suggest this. I'll give you the scripts for the controller medications, and if you find that you need more than one or two puffs of the rescue inhaler in the next week . . . the first time you do . . . you will get them filled and go on Pulmicort and montelukast.” 

When Mac didn't immediately agree, Catherine Barrington launched into a speech that Will assumed she'd given many times about a pregnant woman’s first duty being to protect her unborn child’s well-being, even if that means doing something, or in this case, taking medications, that she might otherwise resist. She leaned into her task and looked pointedly at Mac across the table, saying things about how this was the time to think first of Charlotte and Charlotte’s needs. Will watched in horror as Mac’s face became a nearly expressionless mask. He could see that his wife was receding further and further into a shell, “going back,” Jim had called it. As downward spirals tend to do, this had the consequence of making the doctor press harder to obtain Mac’s agreement that she would use the recommended medicines to keep her airways open. He wanted to interrupt, to tell Catherine that this wasn't necessary, tell her why they had scheduled this appointment, and that she was inadvertently harming, not helping, MacKenzie and the baby, but he wasn't sure how Mac would feel about or react to his doing so. 

Before he could decide, the mask slipped from MacKenzie’s face and was replaced by an expression of distilled anguish. Both of her hands came up to the sides of her head as if she were going to cover her ears, but then moved into her hair and pressed the sides of her temples. “Please, please, stop! Catherine, please . . . I beg of you,” Mac wailed. “ I know . . . I know . . . I'll take them . . . the medicines . . . I'll take them all . . . I know what I should do . . . .” She was becoming increasingly out of breath, but could not seem to stop herself from speaking. “I know . . . I know . . . my job . . . is to . . . protect . . . her . . . . I knew it . . . before . . . I knew . . . it . . . the . . . first . . . time . . . .” The words, “first time” came out in a high pitched keening, as Mac took a shaky breath, said, “oh, God,” and doubling over in her chair, put her head down on her knees, and began to weep.

Both Will and Catherine Barrington had been silent and still since MacKenzie had started to speak. The doctor seemed mesmerized by Mac’s breaking down, which Will could understand since she had absolutely no context into which to place Mac’s obvious pain. As his wife began to cry, Will got up and moved to her side, crouching down, and rubbing her back, while whispering words of comfort. He could feel Mac’s breathing deteriorating into short, gulping inhales, followed by longer, slower forced exhales, which he knew from his internet research was a sure sign that her airways were constricting. He was relived to hear the doctor speak calmly into her desk phone, asking someone to bring her “an oximeter” and “a Proair inhaler with an AeroChamber mask.”

As soon as Dr. Barrington allowed Mac to speak after inhaling the medication, which Will could tell was much sooner than the older woman would have preferred, Mac said, “I couldn't . . . breathe . . . then either.” She turned to Will. “I'd forgotten that. When . . . I . . . went into labor . . . I couldn't make the air move . . . and I was wheezing . . . and again . . . at the end . . . after . . . after . . . .”

Dr. Barrington had been about to intervene and tell Mac to stop talking and take another two puffs, when the words, into labor, stopped her as if she had hit a brick wall. Almost involuntarily she turned and looked at Will. She saw him sitting back down and moving MacKenzie onto his lap. Then, he closed his eyes as he held her, one lone teardrop making its way down his cheek. They remained that way for a long time, the three of them in a frozen tableaux, as MacKenzie’s breathing slowly normalized on its own. Finally, Will spoke.

“Mac . . . oh God . . . Kenz . . . Kenz, if there were one thing I could change in my life it would be not picking up the phone that day . . . I regret . . . .” His voice broke.

“I know, Billy . . . and . . . that helps. You're the only thing that does, really.” After a moment more, Mac touched his cheek. “I think I should go and sit in my own chair now.” Then, turning to Catherine, Mac looked sheepish and chagrined. “My God, Catherine, I'm so . . . sorry. That was rude and . . . .”

“Tell me about being in labor and just how that fact failed to appear on the medical history you gave when you became my patient because I'm quiet sure I would have noted it as pertinent when I was reviewing your file after you plunked those three positive pregnancy tests down on my desk.”

Despite his pain, and despite having heard about the three tests before, Will couldn't help squeezing the hand he was holding and smiling at Mac. He heard her accent in his ear saying “well, you know how I feel about multiple-source confirmation, Billy.” He frequently wondered if he would hallucinate Mac’s voice in his ear for the rest of his life. Probably would, he concluded.

“That’s actually what we came to talk about,” Mac said. “Well, not so much about me lying . . . omitting . . . .”

“No, actually, I like ‘lying’ . . . “ Catherine interrupted. “You can stick with lying.” Mac gave Catherine a guilty, contrite version of her most appealing smile. The doctor was still sitting on the edge of her desk in front of Mac’s chair, where she had been ever since administering the four puffs of albuterol that it had taken to get Mac’s oxygen saturation level back up 95%. 

"I lied to everyone . . .” Mac continued, “in that until . . . “ Mac sighed and rubbed her temples, “Christ, until . . . a few days ago . . . I never told anyone that I'd been . . . pregnant before.”

“Wait, wait,” Catherine said, holding up a hand, “you were pregnant, Mac, you actually went into labor, and no one knew? You didn't know?” she asked, turning to Will.

Will couldn't answer. What did he know? He had been living with MacKenzie at the beginning. He was in intimate contact with her body for the first six . . . seven? . . . weeks of the pregnancy, a body he knew as well as he knew his own. He tried to remember that time, but for so long, it had been so painful to recall the days and weeks leading up to “the breakfast” that he rarely went there even now. He needed to go . . . with Mac and Habib. He needed to face what he had known.

“I didn't tell him,” Mac answered, “and then . . . we were apart. My doctor in D.C. knew. The one who fixed me up in Kabul knew, obviously. A few Army helicopter medics . . . oh, and, the Manager of the Intercontinental, his assistant, a couple of maids and . . . well, whomever they might have told, I suppose.”

Catherine almost burst out laughing at both the journalistic thoroughness and truly bizarre nature of Mac’s answer, except that Mac’s and Will’s expressions reminded her that they were speaking of a tragedy. The pregnancy had obviously not been successful. These people had lost their child . . . their first child. “You need to help me here,” she said instead.


	10. Conversation With Catherine, Part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long. Had a bout of writer's block with this chapter. I appreciate those of you who are still sticking with me on this one.

“Take a break, MacKenzie. Catch your breath. Use the inhaler.” Even if Mac hadn't asked for it, Catherine Barrington felt that they all needed a break. She certainly needed a moment in which to assimilate the information she'd just been given.

“I don't . . . I’ve already . . . had . . . four puffs,” Mac wheezed.

“And you need at least two more. Do you want to do an oximeter reading?” Catherine realized that her voice sounded sharper and more emotional than she'd intended. “Seriously, Mac, after what you’ve just told me, do you really think I’d suggest anything that carries even the remotest possibility of putting this pregnancy at risk?”

“No,” Mac replied meekly, reaching for the inhaler.

They had been talking for quite a while. So long, in fact, that Dr. Barrington had twice excused herself to go and see other patients. Will was gratefully aware that the doctor was making time for Mac by shifting most of the routine consultations to her chief Nurse Practitioner. He'd also noticed that during one of their quiet conversations, Catherine had given the nurse Mac’s other two prescriptions, along with the request that someone named Darlene be asked to call them in to the pharmacy.

Mac had started their story at the very beginning, telling Catherine that when she'd come back to the States to take the job at CNN as Will’s EP, she'd been in a three year relationship with a man she’d “convinced myself I was in love with.” He had broken off the relationship (“I exhausted him, he said”) within a month of her arrival in D.C. 

“And you started dating Will,” Catherine prompted.

“Not right off,” Mac answered. “Actually, Billy and I worked together for quite a while before anything happened . . . .”

“Billy?” Dr. Barrington interrupted. “You call him Billy? The force behind News Night, and, I might add, the most trusted newscaster since Walter Cronkite . . . “

“His idol . . . 

“. . . is really Billy McAvoy?”

Mac laughed. “Shush. That’s a very confidential piece of information known only to a trusted few.” Catherine smiled back at her. “I assume it will not leave this room,” Mac said with mock solemnity.

“Patient-physician privilege . . . they can lock me up and I can't . . . .” Catherine trailed off, as Will became the focus of her thoughts. Suddenly, she was star struck, but more like being overwhelmed in the presence of Mahatma Gandhi than ogling after Justin Bieber. Even though Will had been to every one of Mac’s appointments since his release from the federal lock-up, Catherine suddenly began tripping over herself telling Will how much she respected him for not giving up his source, for going to jail and for staying true to his principles. “Two months in jail, that couldn't have been easy.” Strangely, Will found himself blushing. 

After a moment, Catherine turned her attention back to MacKenzie. “So, what eventually happened after you'd worked together . . . for how long?”

“Seven, maybe eight months. Actually I sort of raped Billy on our first date . . . .”

“Excuse me!”

“Well, I don't mean raped with implements or anything . . . I mean, he cooperated . . . .“ Catherine shot Will an amused glance. 

“Cooperated, Mac?” Will said with a smile, inclining his head to try to see her eyes which were turning downward. “When did you figure out that I was cooperating? The second or the third time we made love that night?” Catherine raised her eyebrows.

“Well,” Mac pushed on, “you can't deny that initially I was certainly the aggressor.”

"If you say so.” Will reached over and ran his fingers down his wife’s cheek. The gesture, affectionate and intimate, brought a smile to Catherine's lips. They were taking a pretty circuitous route to the description of whatever had transpired to put MacKenzie into labor after a secret pregnancy, but she could tell that Mac seemed to feel this context was necessary. And, relating the story this way had the benefit of relaxing MacKenzie and giving the doctor added insight into Will and Mac’s relationship, both of which Catherine decided were benefits that far exceeded the investment of time.

And so MacKenzie described how shortly after her boyfriend, Brian, had broken off their relationship, Will had started asking her to go after work for a drink or to stop on their separate ways home and grab an informal dinner. It wasn't really dating, Mac explained, and at first, she'd accepted Will’s invitations, she confessed, partly in the hope that some of the gossip rags would notice Will’s interest in her, and Brian would see it and realize that he loved her and rekindle the relationship. But he didn't.

“I was having a hard time. I liked Will. I liked him a lot. But I was so sure . . . I’d convinced myself that I was in love with Brian and that I would find some way of getting him back. As I see it now, I'd set it up in my mind that if that wasn't true . . . if I didn't love him enough to stay loyal . . . at least to the idea that Brian was the only one for me, then I'd wasted the previous three years of my life, and I couldn't have that.” Will was fascinated. He had never before heard MacKenzie describe what was going on for her at the genesis of their relationship. 

“So,” Mac went on, “after . . . like I said . . . seven or eight months of this, Will asked me out on a real date . . . to a show in New York. But I had to say no because I'd already agreed to attend my friends’ wedding and read a passage from The Brothers Karamazov in Russian.”

“You speak Russian?”

Mac giggled. “Yes. Will asked me the same thing. Why is that surprising? I also speak French, a passable Pashto, and a smattering of Urdu. Well, back to the wedding, Will looked so crushed when I said I couldn't go to the theatre that I totally surprised myself and asked him to go with me to the wedding.”

“Your first date was to a wedding?” the doctor asked, once again turning toward Will. He nodded. “Brave man,” she observed dryly. 

“After the wedding reception, where we were plied with vodka, we went to dinner and then I invited Will back to my apartment for a coffee, not knowing that in the States, I was signaling that I was willing to have sex with him.” Mac smiled a self-deprecating smile. “And I guess in the end, I was willing. And it was unlike anything I'd ever experienced . . . . It was just so confusing,” she finished quietly.

“So, I gather you two went to a wedding and then finished the evening off with mind-blowing sex, which in MacKenzie provoked an identity crisis. And you,” she said turning toward Will, “you knew nothing about what she was going through. You just thought you'd died and gone to heaven.”

A slight dreamy smile played at the edges of his lips, as Will nodded his head, remembering. “You have no idea how long I'd been . . . “

“I think I do. She just said it . . .” Dr. Barrington gesturing at Mac, “. . . seven or eight months.”

“After that,” Mac went on, “ . . . after being with Will . . . I was just a total mess for a long time. I didn't even recognize myself. Before, sex had always been something you did in a relationship because . . . I don't know . . . just because.” Mac shrugged her shoulders. “I mean, I enjoyed it . . . mostly . . . but not like . . . .” She drifted off as her color came up again.

Will watched her as she spoke. What had he thought about sex before . . . without MacKenzie? Something that was fun, expected, cold, pale, detached and meaningless? Certainly not the constant craving, the need that never faded, certainly not what it became after that first night with her . . . only with her . . . always with her.

“I couldn't focus on anything but how Will made me feel and much I wanted him. Where had this lustful creature come from? It wasn't me. I was in love with Brian. I'd been sure that I wanted to marry him, spend the rest of my life with him and have a family with him.” She looked down at her lap and gave a slight shudder. “I knew that those things had scared him off, but I thought he'd come to his senses . . . and I was supposed to be waiting, saving myself for that . . . not dreaming of another man’s lips and arms and . . . . But I couldn't stop myself. I couldn't give up Will.” 

Catherine nodded. “What happened?”

“A few weeks after . . . the wedding . . . God, it was like my sleeping with Will sent out some sort of homing signal . . . Brian showed up at my door, so to speak, on his best behavior . . . as kind, gentle and loving as I'd ever known him . . . saying that he'd been a fool, that he loved me, that he wanted to marry me and have a family.” Mac shook her head at the recollection and then smiled at Catherine. “Basically, he offered me everything that I'd led myself to believe that I wanted.”

“But . . .” Catherine prompted.

"But . . . I didn't want it . . . anymore. Trouble was, it took a long time for me to get all that sorted. Almost four months. Eventually, I told Brian that I was in love with Will and didn't want to see him again.” 

Something in Mac’s tone of voice made Dr. Barrington ask, “he didn't take that well?”

“God, no,” Mac groaned, “he sort of beat me up . . . .”

“What!?” Will came alive. “Brenner hit you?” “My God, Mac,” he continued in response to her wincing nod, “why didn't you ever say so . . . If I'd known . . . .”

“Will, for Christ’s sake, get down off your white horse. That was more than eight years ago. He never laid a hand on me all the time he was prancing around the newsroom getting ready to make a mockery of everything in which we believe.” The reference to him bringing Brenner back into her life produced a stunned silence on Will’s part. A silence, that was filled by Catherine Barrington.

“Wait! Wait, a minute. Brian Brenner!? The guy who wrote the New York Magazine article. He was the lover you threw over for Will?” Mac nodded. “Well, I suppose that explains the hatchet job. But didn't he say in an interview that Will personally asked him to write the article? How is that possible?”

“That,” Mac said dryly, “is what is commonly known as a good question, and one which many people have asked before you, I might add. Let's just say that at the time, Will and I were not on the best of terms.” She'd thought of many answers to this question, which usually involved some variation on Will’s wanting to hurt her or see her succumb to Brian’s charms so he would have a new reason to continue to hate her. But suddenly, she had a memory of Will saying something about giving her a side-by-side comparison. She'd called him an idiot, but could it be that Will needed to see her reject Brian with his own eyes before he could believe that she would choose him? She’d have to think about that. Talk to Habib.

Turning her attention back to Catherine, Mac continued, "As I said, back when Brian returned, I was a mess. I didn't . . . I kept Brian at arm’s length for quite a while, but . . . well, as I said, it took me four months to come to my senses and act on what I really wanted, and during that time . . . I had sex with Brian four, maybe five times. I was . . . with . . . Will the whole time. I just couldn't make myself let him go. I didn't tell Will . . . about any of it . . . not until . . . not for more than a year and a half. Not until I was pregnant,” she finished softly.

Will sat staring at his hands which were resting on his knees. He had never before heard Mac’s description of what had been happening for her in the early days of their relationship before and after Brian Brenner came back into her life. It was so simple, really, he thought, so innocuous, so . . . understandable. Will could feel his heart rate rising, his breaths becoming more shallow and rapid, as sweat broke out on his forehead and upper lip. It was nothing . . . nothing . . . what she had done with Brian was nothing. Habib had once suggested to him that she was getting herself “unrejected” by Brian, but Will now saw that Mac actually had been obtaining closure on a three-year chapter of her life in order to move on . . . to commit to him. For this, he had hurt MacKenzie, rejected and ignored her, tortured and damaged her. For nothing, he had destroyed their life together. For nothing, he had set in motion the events that had killed their son. Will tried to move his hands but they shook too much. He didn't know how long he stayed that way, gasping for breath with his heart pounding in his ears.

“Billy. Billy. Billy, look at me.” Mac was kneeling in front of him, resting her hands over his. But he couldn't look at her. To look at her would be to die of shame. She stood, and wrapping her arms around him, bent over slightly and pressed his head to her breast. She had found him this way the night before, also frozen, consumed and incapacitated by guilt and remorse. He'd been looking for something in a closet where she'd hastily stashed and then forgotten an open box of things from her apartment. An old, worn, blue and white striped Oxford cloth shirt that had once been his had caught his eye, and he'd pulled it out. There was a brown stain on the back tail and on one sleeve that he knew instinctively could only be blood. Mac’s blood. He didn't ask so she didn't tell him that she had been wearing the shirt over one of his t-shirts in the hotel room in Kabul, wearing it until the air-conditioning cut out and she got too hot, or maybe the pain she was in caused her to pull it off and toss it to the floor where sometime in the morning hours the pool of blood on the carpet seeped close enough to be absorbed by the edge of the fabric. 

Oblivious to Catherine’s presence, Will turned and clutched his wife as if his life depended upon her not letting go. “Billy, listen to me,” MacKenzie spoke more calmly than she felt. “I know that what you did . . . how you reacted to learning about my . . . lying . . . concealing my seeing Brian . . . wasn't just jealousy . . . that it was . . . so many things you’re not responsible for . . . And I know that you didn't hear me say that it happened a long time ago . . . that you thought . . . honestly, I don't know how I could have handled it if I'd believed that we could have been the way we were in ‘07 . . . and at the same time you were cheating on me. Billy, please look at me. I don't blame you. What happened is not your fault.” He looked up as if he were going to argue, but she shook her head and whispered, “let me finish this . . . please.” He nodded and Mac released him, sat down in her chair and turned back to Catherine.

"So we went along and in January 2007, I got pregnant . . . “

“You two weren't trying?”

“No. I mean we weren't exactly being scrupulously careful, and by then, we'd been talking about marriage and children . . . but, it was just . . . I don't know exactly what happened . . . well, I do, actually . . . .”

“I assume that the mind-blowing sex played a role . . . .” It was said with Catherine’s characteristically dry delivery, and Will smiled and seemed to come back to himself after the remark.

“Yes,” Mac chuckled. “No doubt. Anyway, after I took three pee tests and they were all positive, I got it into my head that I really was going to have a baby and needed to tell Will. The problem was . . . I'd never told him about Brian . . . you know sometimes, I could hardly remember Brian . . . but I felt that I shouldn't start our marriage . . . our family . . . without sharing everything that had happened. I never imagined . . . .”

“Imagined what?” Catherine prompted when Mac had been staring at the carpet for several seconds.

“Imagined that I'd go insane . . .” Will began.

“When I told him, Will ended our relationship,” MacKenzie calmly interrupted, looking pointedly at her husband. 

"And you elected not to tell him about the pregnancy?”

“No!” Will’s voice. “I never gave her . . . .”

“Yes.” MacKenzie interrupted again. 

Catherine raised her eyebrows at them, but didn't ask for clarification of their conflicting answers..

“Yes,” Mac repeated, suddenly sounding weary. ““I elected not to tell him.”

“Why?”

“He didn't want . . . he'd ended things, and I didn't want him to feel tied to me . . . because of the baby.”

"But you never considered ending the pregnancy?”

“No! I wanted the baby . . . more than I'd ever wanted anything.”

Catherine just nodded, and let MacKenzie continue the story. Mac quickly covered her downward spiral and her attempt to use the gig in Kabul “to get her head together, start taking better care of myself and reboot” her sagging career. 

The free-form narrative ended when Catherine started peppering Mac with specific questions about her health. For Will, the shocks just kept coming, as he realized how much Mac had glossed over the reality of the situation to protect him. 

She was sleeping only a few hours a night and had gotten down to 116 pounds when the OB-GYN in D.C. had threatened to hospitalize her and she'd fled the country. She'd started having Braxton-Hicks contractions during the week in Surrey. Catherine pulled out of her the details of going into labor, when the bleeding had started and how it had progressed until each contraction had been accompanied by a fresh gush of bright red blood. Catherine’s face became increasingly impassive as she gently prodded MacKenzie to recall the details of her labor and what the doctor kept referring to as “the expulsion of the fetus.”

“I know I lost a lot of blood. I remember the Army doctor . . . the old one I didn't like . . . saying something about . . . something like ‘volumetric’ blood loss . . . .” Mac’s voice trailed off as she tried to recall exactly what she'd heard. 

“Hypovolaemic shock? Is that what you heard? The doctor said you were in hypovolaemic shock?”

“Yes. That sounds right.”

“Were you . . . did you go into cardiac arrest?” Out of the corner of her eye, Catherine saw Will startle at the words.

“I don’t think . . . I don't remember . . . I guess, I don't really know,” Mac finally concluded, a perplexed look on her face.

"In the hotel room, MacKenzie, when you started bleeding like that, you didn't call anyone?”

Mac shook her head and then paused, “well, except Billy . . . .”

“In New York?”

Mac nodded. “I called Will . . . but he didn't . . . I left messages.”

Catherine started to ask why MacKenzie hadn’t called someone at the hotel, someone who could summon medical help, but had only gotten out the word, “why,” when she was interrupted by a strangled sound from Will, something between a choking moan and a whimper.

So, Mac answered the question, “why?” “I was frightened,” she said simply. “And . . . I thought I was dying . . . I wanted to hear Will’s voice. I wanted . . .to . . . say good-bye.”

Oh, dear God, Catherine thought, trying to (and at the same time trying not to) imagine what MacKenzie must have been going through, the terror, pain and grief, everything that was encompassed in that single word, “frightened.” She saw Will swallowing hard, his neck muscles working, showing the effort of putting his implacable reporter’s visage in place. The doctor was tempted to walk over and touch the younger woman, but realized that MacKenzie’s hold on her composure seemed not to allow for any contact except for the finger tips that were resting in the palm of her husband’s hand.

Catherine turned the conversation in a less emotional vein, and Mac described what she could remember of waking up in the military hospital and the young doctor (“he was a kid, really”) whose name she said she could not recall, but who stopped his older counterpart from doing a hysterectomy. She described being told by both the older Army doctor and another doctor in the UK that because of the damage that had been done to her uterus, it was unlikely that the attempted repairs could have succeeded well enough for her to get pregnant or carry the child through the first trimester. Catherine was aghast, and assured MacKenzie that they couldn't have known that from a single exam . . . shouldn't have made such a prediction . . . and besides, had already been proved wrong by “little Miss Charlotte here.”

Finally, Catherine asked Mac if there was anything else that she remembered that they hadn't covered.

“I remember pulling up my t-shirt . . . and trying . . . to give him . . . the baby . . . my breast.” Mac said quietly, taking shallow, vaguely wheezy breaths.

Will saw terror flit across the doctor’s eyes and knew that she thought Mac was describing a psychotic incident in which her inability to accept that her child was stillborn had made her truly unable to distinguish between life and death. At least in that regard, the truth would be a relief to her, he thought. 

“I didn't think . . . I had any colostrum yet . . . “ Will saw the technical precision of Mac’s choice of words register on Catherine. He also realized in that instant that focusing on Catherine helped him keep his own pain and self-loathing from becoming overwhelming. “I just thought . . . that it might comfort him . . . He was working so hard to breathe . . .”

“What . . . !?”

“. . . I knew neither of us . . . were going to live . . . but . . . .” 

Mac spoke to the hands in her lap, her’s and one of Will’s, and was oblivious to the expression of astonishment, horror, comprehension and compassion that suffused Catherine Barrington’s face. “I . . . of all people . . . should have known . . . that when you’re struggling to breathe . . . the last thing you need to be doing . . . is putting something big and soft into your mouth.” She started to look up. “Of course . . . he couldn't do it . . . couldn't nurse.”

Will knew that he would never again put his lips to his wife’s breast without the memory of this moment gutting him. He would never watch his living child . . . Charlotte . . . suckle without thinking of the agony Mac must have suffered watching their first child die.

Mac’s eyes were locked into Catherine’s. “Have you ever been truly helpless, Catherine? Completely powerless?” Dr. Barrington nodded. “There was . . . nothing . . . I . . . could do . . . for him,” Mac gasped out as her breathing deteriorated. “You know . . . those miracle babies . . . the ones who survive . . . at 23 . . . or 24 weeks?” She took a wheezy breath as Will’s grasp on her hand tightened, “William . . . would have been . . . one of them . . . . He fought so long . . . . He would . . . have lived . . . if I had been . . . if I hadn't taken him to fucking . . . Kabul.” Mac’s composure shattered, as she pitched forward into Will’s arms and Catherine bolted around the desk. 

Catherine Barrington hugged them both as they left, feeling a sudden maternal rush, although the twelve or thirteen years between herself and Will hardly qualified her as a mother figure. Mac had signed waivers and releases (so distracted that Catherine wasn't sure they would qualify as “informed consent”) allowing her to speak freely to Jacob Habib and to another OB-GYN, a “high risk pregnancy” specialist, she wanted to consult. Seeing their faces, she wished she could have thought of another way to describe him, and she assured them both repeatedly that she was confident there was no cause to worry. Sending them on their way, she reiterated that she was glad that they were going to see a therapist together. Finally, she made Will promise that someone would pick up Mac’s medications as soon as possible, and Mac promise that she would start taking them that evening. 

After the door closed, Dr. Barrington sat for a long time staring at nothing like a shell-shocked soldier. Then, she picked up her telephone and dialed. As she'd expected, she got his answering machine. “Dan, it's Catherine . . . Catherine Barrington. I’ve got a patient I'd like to discuss with you. Nothing urgent. Give me a call when you get the chance.”


	11. Reunion

“Billy . . . “ It was the last message she had left for him from the hotel room that day in Kabul. He thought of it that way, as “that day” . . . he could not bear to let himself think of it as William’s birthday. He could not call it what it was, the day his son had been born and died. 

Will had earbuds in as the copy on the thumb drive he carried played on his laptop computer. It was the middle of the night. MacKenzie was sleeping peacefully as she always did after they made love. He had slept as well, at first, but then, he had awakened, thinking . . . thinking . . . as he did almost constantly these days, about all of the things he wished he could do over, everything he wished he'd have done differently . . . differently with Mackenzie, even differently with Charlie. So, he got up and drifted to his computer. He wasn't sure why he couldn't stop listening to the voice messages she had left for him from Afghanistan. He replayed them all. He'd replayed some of them, especially the last one, so many times, he'd lost count. He played that one again. MacKenzie’s voice was so weak by the end that he had to strain to hear her words, even though he had the volume turned up. Her speech was slightly slurred and she could only get out one or two words before she had to pause and gasp for a wheezy breath. She had been dying, he knew, dying and saying good-bye. 

“Billy . . . I . . . I know you’re not listening . . . to this . . . . Well, maybe . . . you will . . . after . . . . I know . . . you don't . . . want me . . . to call . . . . I just . . . I . . . I'm . . . sorry . . . so sorry . . . for all of it . . . Brian . . . everything. I'm sorry . . . to . . . leave you . . . like . . . this . . . with . . . such a mess. Please . . . please . . . be okay . . . please know . . . I want you . . . to have . . . a good life . . . find someone who . . . will love you . . . someone . . . you . . . can love . . . have a ch . . . child.” The last was more a sob than a spoken word.

. I thought . . . we were going . . . to have . . . everything . . . but now . . . it's all gone.” Her voice cracked and Will’s heart broke anew. “I love you . . . Billy . . . you have . . . to . . . to believe . . . please . . . . I've . . . I’ve . . . loved you since . . . the day of the wedding . . . the first time . . . you . . . touched me . . . . I was just . . . screwed up . . . . It took me . . . four months . . . to get . . . myself sorted . . . and I lied and . . . and . . . hid Brian's return from you.” Now her voice was thick with tears. “But I . . . told him . . . I loved . . . you . . . and . . . wanted him . . . gone . . . . After that . . . I was . . . never . . . unfaithful . . . . You have to . . . believe me . . . . The last time . . . I saw Brian . . . was almost . . . two . . . two . . . years ago . . . . Please . . . please, Billy . . . believe that and believe . . . that I wanted . . . I . . . I . . . I didn't want . . . any of this . . . to . . . happen . . . . Please . . .believe . . . me . . . .” she pleaded, sounding small, childlike and frightened. 

Will paused the recording and lowered his head into his hands. Dear God, he prayed. She'd expected him to be listening to this after they'd found her body and William’s body in the hotel room, after he'd been told about how she'd died giving birth to a premature baby. He would have heard, that was certain, through the media if no other way. Not even Ambassador McHale could have kept her death in a Kabul hotel room out of the press. In fact, her credentials and family would have worked against her. She was the daughter of the British Ambassador to the UN and the Earl of Ailesbury, the Executive Producer (or former EP, he wasn't sure of her status in June ’07) of “This Day in Washington” on CNN, in Afghanistan to produce a segment on the U.S. military. No, her death, especially under such incredible circumstances, would have made the news. He was sure of it, and she must have known it too. That was the mess she referred to. He was sure of that, too. Talking about Brian, she was telling him that the dead infant they would find . . . the body of the newborn he would hear about . . . was his. Would he have believed it back then? He imagined that if he'd disputed it, a distraught Cat McHale would have had his and the baby’s DNA tested and thrown the results in his face while she cursed him to the fiery Hell he deserved.

He tapped the play button. Now his wife’s voice sounded weaker and farther away, as if the effort of the explanation had exhausted her. He strained harder to hear. Her breathing was ragged, deteriorating, until she seemed unable to speak any words other than his name, until she simply repeated “Billy” over and over again. And then, there was silence, an excruciating silence that screamed in his ears until finally the maximum message time was exceeded and the answering machine disconnected the call. Why hadn't he picked up? What would he have done if he had listened to this message even the day or week after it was recorded? He wanted to think that he'd have gone to her, found her in that military hospital and brought her home. 

Charlie . . . Charlie, Will thought, feeling the familiar grief slice through him. Charlie had gone to D.C. looking for her. If he'd listened to the messages, he would have told Charlie about them . . . He couldn't have hid them from Charlie. And Charlie would have made him go to her, or gone with him, or . . . Christ . . . gone without him if it had come to that.

If only he had listened to them, there would have been no Iraq, no Pakistan, no IED’s killing people she cared about before her eyes, no stabbing, no painful adhesions ripping apart to make room for Charlotte. So much would have been different if he had only been less stubborn, less rigid, less insecure, less hurt, less angry . . . more Charlie Skinner’s son and less John McAvoy’s boy.

 

This was a morning Jack Habib decided to just let Will McAvoy ramble. Will told him about listening to “the messages” again in the middle of the previous night, and about hiding his obsession with them from MacKenzie. Will scrubbed his hands repeatedly over his face as he concluded. He pulled the thumb drive out of his pocket and showed it to the doctor. He looked exhausted. 

“Everyone . . . even me . . . but especially MacKenzie . . . seems to react to the news that she called me . . . from the hotel . . . like she called the wrong person.” He paused. “And I get that . . . how someone who could get her . . . them . . . “ Will’s voice cracked. “. . . immediate medical attention was more important.” Another long pause. “But . . . that’s wrong . . . well, not wrong, maybe . . . but . . . but . . . that’s only . . . . It was . . . only . . . because . . . because . . . “ Will repeated, swallowing, trying to get the words out before his emotions overwhelmed his ability to speak. Dr. Habib waited patiently, as though he had all century to finish this conversation. “. . . because . . . I . . . I . . . didn't . . . answer her.” The last two words were a wail of anguish and shame. Will cried for a very long time, overwhelmed by regret and guilt. It took every bit of the young doctor’s self control to remain passive, although he didn't have the vaguest notion of what he would do if he allowed himself to act. He just knew that he hurt terribly for this man in front of him.

“But you see, we all have it wrong . . .” Will finally spoke again. “I was the fucking right person for her to have called.” Now his voice, still thick with tears, angrily emphasized every word. “I was the . . . only . . . only . . . person . . . “ His face twisted in pain. “. . . that she should have needed to call.” He didn't cry this time. Instead, Will looked straight at Habib. “MacKenzie’s not crazy . . . and she wasn't suicidal . . . she's just . . . “ A smile both sad and fond played briefly over Will’s lips. “She's like Churchill, she . . . sometimes, she doesn't know when to give up, when to finally lose hope in a lost cause.” Will shrugged slightly, and wiped his eyes. “She wanted to . . . to count on me, that’s all. She’d still hoped . . . she still wanted to be able to tell me what was happening and know that I'd take care of . . . everything . . . take care of her,” he said the words like it was the most self-evident concept in the world. “When she was giving birth to our son and watching him die, she just wanted . . . me. That's not so strange, is it?” Will had been turning the thumb drive over and over between his fingers as he spoke.

“No,” Habib replied softly, “not strange at all.” They sat in silence for a while.

"I wonder . . . will I ever be normal again?” Will looked down at the object in his hands and then back up at Habib.

“Are you asking whether you will ever be the person you were . . . or thought you were . . . before Mac told you what had actually happened back then? Because that’s doubtful. I don't see how that's possible. You lived for years in a reality constructed around the idea that she betrayed you with Brenner, that all of the time you two were together she was only pretending to love you, and in the end she dumped you for him. Now you know that none of it was true.” Habib shrugged his shoulders and snorted out a half-laugh. “Normal? Christ, Will, I don't have the vaguest notion what’s normal under these circumstances. I don't know what to expect. I don't even see how Mac can be functional after what she went through, but she is. Her entire world blew apart in an instant. Every instinct with which she’d predicted your behavior, your reaction to her disclosure that she briefly reconciled with her ex-boyfriend at the start of your relationship, had been proved wrong. And, in her mind the mistake had cost her her life. Then, she went from vomiting on your floor . . . “ Will hadn't heard that before, and assumed that it was something Mac had told Habib at one of her private sessions. “. . . to feeling out of control, hurting herself, but unable to stop, to experiencing . . . the loss of her baby . . . Christ! . . . and her own death, alone and abandoned. If that wasn't enough, she took herself off to a self-imposed exile in a situation that was insanely traumatic, chaotic and unpredictable in its own right.” Habib sighed. “I don't know how to help her, and I don't know how to help you. What happened to you both is almost beyond imagining. It's a fucking ball buster. So don't ask me what normal looks like . . . .”

Somehow the young doctor’s monologue made Will feel better. Despite himself, he chuckled, “fucking ball buster?” he asked, “is that a psychiatric term?”

“Yeah,” Jack Habib replied, also smiling a little. “One of Abe’s. It describes those times when the thing that the patient experienced is just so intensely traumatic that you’re in uncharted waters . . . He had a couple of patients who were 9/11 kids. They'd watched on TV while the building where they knew their parents were trapped imploded before their eyes.” Will thought of Kaylee. “How do you help someone through the aftermath of something like that? How do you say anything and not have it sound trite or like a platitude?” Habib looked at Will. “You’re doing really well, Will. You and Mac both are.”

As Will was leaving, Habib said, “you know, Will, buying a quarter of a million dollar ring in order to trick a woman you claimed not to care about into thinking you were going to give it to her years ago and then ripping up the receipt wasn't normal. Proposing marriage out of the blue on Election night an hour after you'd gone out of your way to hurt MacKenzie wasn't normal. Positioning yourself to take the heat for some guy in your shop . . . Phil . . . .”

“Neal.”

“And going to jail for two months rather than reveal Neal’s source . . . I'm not sure that was normal . . . “

“Hey, don't knock it ‘til you’ve tried it. I lost 20 pounds in there. I even gave up smoking ‘til Charlie died.” Will’s smile faded slightly. “But I only relapsed for four days. My stomach’s flatter than it’s been since college, and I came out with lower blood pressure, cholesterol count and blood sugar than I had 25 years ago.” Will smiled brightly again as Habib shook his head. 

“And with a woman, who rather than feeling abandoned by you in her first trimester, is so proud of you, she’s ready to burst. That's what I'm trying to say. Look where you are. Look what you’ve got. Mac and the baby.” Habib smiled ironically. “If I were you, I'd just keep doing what you’re doing. It's a little late now to start worrying about normal.”

Will tried to remember that.

 

Unlike Will who came out of his session comforted and energized, Mac returned from her afternoon “hour” with Habib pale, shaken and exhausted. Will took one look at her sitting at her desk, trying manfully to concentrate on some corporate financials, and insisted that his rundown was set, he had little to do until the show and he wanted her to come downstairs and take a nap in his office. She saw the worry on her husband’s face and knew that she must still look like something pulled through a ringer. Truth be told, she still felt like the life had been squeezed out of her. She had recalled more of the military hospital and the aftermath of the baby’s . . . William’s, she mentally corrected herself, birth. She still couldn't conjure up the name of the young doctor who had helped her, and all of the time between the hospital and being in Atlanta was a blank, but she had remembered many things with Habib that she had not remembered with Will. Mac sighed deeply, and promised to come to his office as soon as she finished a telephone call with Pruit about the budget, and a “couple of other things,” she didn't describe. 

 

Leona Lansing’s face was a mask of disapproval. Mac felt herself squirm uncomfortably in one of Leona’s fabulous looking but stiff and hard visitors’ chairs (“keeps people from hanging around too long,” Lee had told her when she'd commented on them). “I would never have done such a thing,” Leona was saying, “I was heartbroken when Charlie left me, but I protected Reese. I would never have let harm come to Reese. I was a good mother. Not like you,” she looked pointedly at Mac, blue eyes piercing Mac’s defenses as only Leona Lansing could. Mac felt a new wave of guilt move through her. “You shouldn't even be a mother. What if you harm this baby too. People like you shouldn't have children.”

“No . . . no . . . I . . . I’ll . . . .” Mac tried to defend herself. Leona was wrong! She'd never hurt this baby. She'd hadn't meant to do anything to harm William. But no words would come out of her mouth. 

“Charlie would have been terribly disappointed in you if he had known,” Leona continued. “He thought you were wonderful,” she laughed, “but I don't think he'd have been able to bring himself to talk to you, if he'd known what you’d done.” Pain and shame, gaining in intensity, lanced through MacKenzie, and her body wanted to run, run from what she was hearing, run from herself. But she couldn't seem to make her legs obey, and so she remained. “I doubt he would have wanted someone who killed her child to have succeeded him as President of ACN.”

Mac ears started ringing. "I'm sorry . . . I'm . . . so sorry . . . .”

“Well, it's a little late for that now,” was Leona’s quick retort.

“I didn't mean to . . . I didn't want him . . . to die . . . .” Mac felt desperate to explain, to make Leona see that she had not intended to harm her baby.

“Didn't you?” Leona inquired sharply. “Are you sure you weren't trying to punish Will for calling you on your cheating ways by killing his child?

“No! No! I . . . .” The thought was horrific. It couldn't be true. It couldn't be. Could it? Suddenly Mac felt her throat and lungs close. She began to cough and wheeze.

“Oh, right,” Leona said sarcastically, “now I'm supposed to feel sorry for you because you can't breathe. Well, I don't. It's not going to work.”

Mac wanted the inhaler, needed the inhaler, but it wasn't there. She thought it might be in a pocket, but the clothes she was wearing had no pockets. That wasn't right. She recognized this skirt. It had two pockets. But they weren't here, or she couldn't find them. The ringing in her ears intensified, but over it, she could hear Leona continuing to talk, continuing to condemn her as selfish and weak, although the sound of the older woman’s voice increasingly seemed to be coming from farther and farther away. 

Staggering to her feet, Mac tried to explain that she needed to leave, needed to get the rescue medication. “Can't breathe . . . can't breathe . . . “ was all that she could get out.

“I can see that,” Leona’s voice remained cold and condemning. “Could he breathe? Could your son breathe? Could William breathe?”

Unable now to speak, Mac simply shook her head.

“Maybe you shouldn't be able to breathe either,” Leona suggested, “maybe you don't deserve to breathe.” 

Mac tried to say something, agree or argue, she wasn't sure, but no words emerged, only a gasping, wheezing sound.

“Get out,” Leona ordered, and Mac somehow found her feet, turned and fled.

She collapsed onto the hall carpet outside of Leona’s office, crawling forward on her hands and knees. Suddenly, she felt nauseated and hot. Her body contracted into a ball on the floor as a sharp pain spread from her back to her lower abdomen. Her ears rang louder and she started to sweat. She looked down and there was a dark stain spreading on the carpet. But the color of the carpet was wrong. A pain, more intense than any she could recall sliced through her again, and she realized that the stain was blood, her blood. Please, God, no . . . no, she prayed, not Charlotte too . . . please, please. 

Suddenly, she knew that she wasn't in the hall way on the executive floor at AWM any longer. Gasping for air, she tried to pull herself up on something soft in front of her. It was a bed, the sheets were loose and slick with more blood. She doubled over, grabbing her stomach as another wave of agony swamped her and realized that she was naked except for an oversized t-shirt. She screamed, which turned into a coughing fit that shook her entire body and seemed to go on for a very long time. She curled down on her side panting . . . waiting . . . .

“MacKenzie . . . Kenz . . . wake up . . . Sweetheart, breathe! Breathe! For Christ’s sake . . . please, please breathe . . . .” Billy’s voice was coming at her across a great foggy distance. “Here . . . sit up . . . sit up.” She felt hands, strong hands, lifting her, holding her. Billy! Billy was with her!

Will felt stupid and clumsy trying to help his wife use the inhaler. He wasn't nearly as adept as Jim. Of course she hadn't been this bad the last time she’d had an attack in his office. Now, in addition to the seizing up of her lungs, she seemed still half asleep and deeply traumatized by whatever she had dreamt. He couldn't tell what this nightmare had been about, but it had shaken her in a way he thought he'd never seen before. He didn't think much of the four puffs he'd tried to give her was getting down into her lungs. He waited out the four minutes before giving her more as Catherine and WebMD had instructed, holding her upright against him, breathing slowly and evenly, or as slowly and evenly as the adrenaline coursing through his body would allow. He thought about Jim’s description of the bad asthma attack in the desert. He spoke softly to her, rubbing her arms and trying to get her to relax her shoulders which he could see were engaged in the effort of breathing. He told her over and over that he loved her and that everything would be alright. 

After the second round of four puffs from the inhaler, MacKenzie’s respiration seemed to slow a bit and her wheezing grew louder, both of which Will knew from his internet reading were signs that her airways were opening, if only a little. She made eye contact with him and he was overjoyed to see in her expression that she was back, knew who he was and where she was. But she didn't seem to be getting better the way she had before. When she tried to speak, the effort produced another round of dry, hollow, body-shaking coughs. 

Will looked for Mac’s phone and dialed Catherine Barrington’s mobile number. The doctor answered on the sixth ring, just when Will expected to be connected with her voicemail. Will described what was happening.

“Shit!” Catherine said in response. “This is my fault. I should have had you get a spacer or a nebulizer for times like this. And I'd sure love to have an idea about how much oxygen the baby’s getting. Are her fingernails bluish down by the quick?”

“They’re polished,” Will said, trying not to panic at the direction this conversation was taking.

“Shit,” Catherine repeated, "fuck." She apologized for the profanity.

“Don't,” Will countered quickly, “you’ve obviously never been in a newsroom.

“I assume that her lips aren't blue, or you would have mentioned it.”

“No, not that I can see.”

“Okay, I'm going to have you get a pulse oximeter, but for right now, Will, and out of an abundance of caution, I think it's ER time. I want to get a sat reading and a nebulized breathing treatment isn't going to hurt . . . .”

“Should I call 911?”

Before Catherine could answer, Mac had managed to half scream, half bellow, “no!” The effort sent her into another paroxysm of coughing. Will heard Catherine chuckle. “Can you get a car or taxi easily?” she asked. “I think if you can, that would be fine. What’s the nearest hospital? Unfortunately, I'm in Mystic . . . “

“What?” Will interrupted, able to think only of one of Mac’s favorite songs, “Into the Mystic.”

“Mystic. Connecticut. My daughter lives here.”

“Okay. Yes, of course. Sorry,” Will sputtered.

“You call a car and figure out what’s the nearest hospital and I'll call a colleague to cover for me. I belong to a group and we rotate who’s on call to for the others. Actually, I think it's Dan today. He's the doctor I was telling you about.” She paused. Will said nothing. “Now, let me talk to Mac.”

Will handed the phone to his wife and got up to find his own and call for AWM 4, Charlie’s car, which Leona had talked Pruit into renting for Mac. He also dug out the list of hospitals in close proximity to ACN that he’d had Jenna make up for him the day Mac had told him she was pregnant. The car ordered, and the list in hand, Will sat down next to his wife who was breathlessly and only half-heartedly arguing with her doctor about going to the hospital. 

"We are about equidistant from Presbyterian and Beth Israel,” Will told Catherine, reclaiming the phone. 

“Go to Beth Israel,” Catherine commanded, “that will be easier for Dan. There’s a good chance he's there now.”

Mac insisted on walking to the car. Will enlisted Jim’s help to divert the staff by calling them into the conference room to tell them that Mac and Will had needed to run an unexpected errand and that while in all likelihood Will would be back in plenty of time for the broadcast, he wanted to review that rundown with Sloan sitting in for Will. While they were engaged speculating on what was going on, Mac walked across the bullpen, down the corridor and into the elevator, looking to the casual observer as if she were going on her own steam, but in reality, wheezing and leaning heavily on Will.

 

Mac was on her second dose of nebulized albuterol when the door to the ER treatment room opened and after pausing for a long moment on the threshold, a man in a white coat, with dark hair and a sharp aquiline nose, entered the room. Will was sitting behind his wife on the small bed that was really a motorized stretcher, holding her upright against him, stroking her hair, breathing slowly and rhythmically with her, and thinking about the asthma attack she'd suffered during the sandstorm and the man Mac and Jim called, “Monk.” MacKenzie was much better, but so very exhausted. Her eyes were closed and her head turned sideways against his chest, but not sleeping, Will thought. Her breathing wasn't quite to where she could fall asleep no matter how bone tired she was. 

He looked at his watch, and realized that very soon, he needed to make a decision about whether he was going to leave her and return to the studio to get dressed and prepped for tonight's show. He didn't want to leave her alone, and even more so, he didn't want her having to get home on her own. But his missing a show would occasion far more comment and questions than arriving back in the nick of time, and he knew a big brouhaha with the News Night staff would only add to Mac’s stress level. Will was thinking about having Jim induct Jenna into the conspiracy so that she could come to the hospital and go home with Mac if she were released before he could get back when he noticed that the examination room door had opened and a man was watching him from the doorway. Will automatically put on his “fan-greeting” smile, as the man stepped into the room.

There was a boyish air about him, although his white coat announced him as a doctor or other medical professional. At first, Will thought him as young as Habib, but the thin lines starting to form around his serious brown eyes made Will revise his estimate and place him in his mid- to late-thirties, just a couple of years younger than MacKenzie.

"Mr. McAvoy,” the man said, starting to extend his hand, and then dropping it a little sheepishly when he realized that both of Will’s were occupied holding onto his wife. “It's a pleasure to meet you. I watch News Night whenever I’m clear at 8:00. Ever since Northwestern. I loved what you said . . . well, I guess, except for the worst generation part. That was a harsh generalization.” Will winced guiltily and nodded. “But based on the profile the Sunday Times did on your shop, ‘Sorority Girl’ has forgiven you.” The young man’s eyes danced playfully. “Seriously though, these last few years, you’ve really been doing some great things.” 

“Thanks,” Will said with genuine humility. “I've had a terrific partner.” Impulsively, he planted a kiss in his wife’s hair. Will noticed that Mac wasn't reacting to the conversation and wondered if possibly she had fallen asleep, but knowing her breathing patterns as intimately as he did, he didn't think so. 

“Yes, you have,” the white-coated man replied, glancing almost surreptitiously at Mac with a look that along with the tone of his voice struck Will as just the least bit odd. Then, he cleared his throat and spoke again. “I'm pinch hitting for Catherine. I'm also an OB-GYN. I guess you spoke to her, and know she's up in Connecticut with her daughter.” Now, although he continued to speak to Will, the man’s gaze shifted completely to MacKenzie, and a smile came to his lips. “I'm Dr. Shivitz. Daniel Shivitz.”

Suddenly, Mac’s eyes opened wide, as if she were emerging from a dream. She gaped at the man in front of her, even as she struggled to sit up completely and pull the nebulizer mask from her face. “Shivitz?” she repeated the name breathlessly. “Daniel? Daniel Shivitz?” Then, Will saw her face soften, and she whispered, as if unable to believe what she was saying, “Danny? Danny? Is it really you?”

“The one and only,” the doctor replied, bowing from the waist in an exaggerated courtly gesture.

A look of pleasure and disbelief came over MacKenzie’s face. Will felt himself tense with an emotion he wanted to call caution, but knew in his heart was the stirrings of jealousy. “You’re an idiot,” he heard his wife’s voice in his mind, “don't be an arse.” Nevertheless, Will was relived to see a small gold band on the doctor's left hand.

“Danny . . . Danny, I'm pregnant,” he heard his wife say, as tears started to fill her eyes.

“I know, Mac,” Dr. Shivitz replied softly, while a huge grin appeared and made him once again look like a college kid. “And I can see,” he added, gesturing vaguely in the direction of her mid-section. Mac ran her hand over her belly and smiled with joy, never taking her eyes from Shivitz. “And,” the doctor continued, now gesturing toward Will, and speaking in a voice that indicated he was asking a question while knowing the answer full well, “this would be Billy?”

Any insecurity that Will might have felt at witnessing this reunion evaporated as he looked at Mac’s face. Her eyes shown like chocolate diamonds and tears overflowed her lower lids as she dipped her head in a shy nod and smiled a smile that conveyed that by some miracle, she possessed everything that was her heart’s desire. She squeezed the hand that was wrapped around Will’s arm, and nodded again.

“Told ya,” Dan Shivitz taunted her like a child. “And you’re sadly mistaken if you think I'm not collecting on our bet . . . you do remember what we wagered, don’t you?”

"You two had a bet about me? When?” Will sounded confused and incredulous.

“Before Mac left Kabul . . . when she went to Atlanta before Iraq,” Shivitz answered. “She’d been saying that you didn't want her anymore, and I bet her that she was wrong.“

Will moaned at the thought of MacKenzie in Kabul thinking that he no longer loved her. Then, the doctor’s words sunk in. “You were in Kabul?” Will asked, even as Mac’s statement about the young doctor who had saved her fertility sprang into his mind.

Both Mac and Shivitz answered at once.

“Danny was . . .”

“The Army helped pay for medical school,” Dan interrupted. “I was just out and stationed at the main surgical hospital in the Green Zone. I was on duty when . . . the day that Mac was brought in after . . . .” Will nodded quickly, his eyes locked with the doctor’s. Will wanted to cut him off before he could say the words out loud. Shivitz must have understood this because he trailed off.

“You were the one who . . . saved . . . her.” Now, it was Shivitz’ turn to nod. “Thank you,” Will whispered fervently. “Thank you.”

In the end, it was decided that Will would go back to the studio and do the show, and Mac would remain at the hospital with Danny until he could get back, at which time, she would be released and he could take her home. Mac had argued that she was fine now and should just go with Will, but Dan had called a pulmonary specialist friend to look at Mac and he couldn't get there for another couple of hours. She relented when Shivitz appealed to her manners saying that the man had already rearranged his day to see her so she couldn't very well be rude enough not to be there when he arrived. 

"Besides, don't you want to watch News Night with me and critique his delivery?" Shivitz asked.

This produced a chuckle from his wife. Will kissed her passionately and dragged himself away wondering what new turn their lives had just taken.


	12. Nightmares

“And why is it that you need to remember?” Daniel Shivitz asked in response to Mac’s confession that try as she might, there was a great deal that she couldn't recall about her time in Kabul. She had suppressed huge chunks of time, events, even his name until that afternoon. “But not your face, not your eyes, Danny,” she had told him. They’d had a relatively relaxed evening, sharing the dinner that was brought in for MacKenzie, watching News Night, agreeing that Will McAvoy was an exceptional on-air talent and intellect, and beginning to reminisce a bit about their time together.

“Because of the nightmares,” she replied in answer to his query. “They . . . they really upset Will, and he's already feeling so much regret and guilt . . . such terrible guilt.” There was worry and empathy and even a touch of her own culpability in Mac’s voice. Dan Shivitz just stared blankly at her, opened his mouth to speak and then clamped it shut. “What?” she asked. He shook his head. “No, Danny,” she insisted, “say what you were going to say.”

“That he should feel damned guilty,” Shivitz said with great conviction. “He never answered you, Mac,” Dan added when he could see from her face she was preparing to argue the point. “You sent him . . . what?. . . fifty . . . a hundred messages before you ended up in the hospital in Kabul.”

“He never read or listened to them,” she insisted.

Again, Shivitz stared at her in disbelief. “And,” he began slowly, “that is being offered in his defense?”

“I never told him that I was pregnant.”

“How could you do that when he wouldn't read or listen to your messages.”

“I could have found a way to put it in his face. Contacted people who would have told him. Charlie Skinner. Mrs. Lansing.”

Danny shook his head. “I wish my wife were so willing to absolve me of my sins.”

Mac snorted a half sigh and gave him the ghost of a smile. “Will is a good man, Danny . . . a good, gentle, empathetic and loving man. He admits that he over-reacted when I told him about Brian. And, well, it's complicated. There are things you don't know.”

Shivitz, who had begun to pace, sat down in the chair next to the stretcher. “I know he was wired to go off the deep end . . . but . . . shit, Mac . . . “ Dan held out both hands in a gesture of frustrated emphasis. “What you did just wasn't that bad . . . it wasn't that un-understandable . . . it didn't justify what he did to you.”

“You don't understand,” MacKenzie said patiently. “He didn't really even hear what I was saying. The facts of my . . . my time with Brian didn't enter into it. He was caught up in . . . things happened to him that you don't know about . . . “

Shivitz was back on his feet. “I do know,” he sighed in exasperation that she was still taking so much on herself, even after all of these years. “I know that his father physically and verbally abused him practically from infancy, and his mother couldn't or didn't try to stop it or get him away from his father.” 

Mac looked shocked and aghast. “How do you know that? It's not public . . . . Oh, God,” she moaned. “I told you; didn't I?” It was more a statement than a question. How would Will react if he knew she had shared his darkest secret with a stranger? Panic and guilt clutched at her throat. “I should never have done that. Why did I do that? When?” She sounded horrified at herself.

“In June of 2007, shortly after you were released from the hospital. My God, Mac! You can't start blaming yourself for talking about what had happened to you. You barely survived. You had to talk. You had to heal.” He grabbed her hand, and looked into her eyes. “I'll tell you about your missing memories, if that's what you want, MacKenzie. I remember every hour . . . every moment of those days and weeks.” He raised and lowered his other hand, as if he were going to touch her cheek and then thought better of it. “But you need to know something, Mac. Starting your heart again and putting your uterus back together . . . that was the easy part.” Mac looked stunned and slightly dazed as if she were trying to comprehend and accept the ramifications of what he was saying. “So, I will never be convinced that you have reason to apologize for anything that you did or said during that time.”

She didn't have a chance to respond because at that moment, the exam room door opened and Jonathan Fischer walked in.

 

“So your biggest asthma triggers at this point are physical exertion and emotional stress,” Fischer summed up after Mac had recounted her childhood wheezing episodes, her time in the Middle East and problems with blowing sand, the mild wheezing that came when she ran on cold mornings but always went away after a while, the couple of occasions since her return to New York when her chest got tight in response to strong emotions, and finally, the full-scale attacks that had become more frequent since she’d started to remember things about what she described simply as a “long suppressed traumatic experience.” Mac nodded. 

“This experience . . . How traumatic are we talking?” Fischer asked.

“Very,” Dan blurted out before Mac could answer.

“I was an embedded reporter for CNN in the Middle East for three years. I saw . . . Well, several people whom I cared for deeply died . . . in my . . . presence. I still dream about it.” Fischer nodded. Mac took a shaky breath. “Charlie Skinner, the President of ACN, had a heart attack at the end of June. I was with him in the ambulance . . . when . . . he lost consciousness for the last time. He wasn't pronounced dead until they'd tried to revive him at hospital . . . but . . . well . . . I've seen . . . .” She trailed off, as Fischer nodded. This was news to Danny. The press hadn't reported that MacKenzie had been in the ambulance with Skinner. “And, lately, I've been sharing . . . talking about . . . some of what happened in the Middle East with my husband . . . and a therapist . . . and in the process, I've been recalling things that I'd forgotten . . . or repressed.” Fischer nodded again. Mac didn't say anything more, and after a few moments, the pulmonologist spoke again.

“You had an asthma flare-up at work a week ago, you said, that you self-treated with an expired albuterol inhaler.” This time it was Mac’s turn to nod. “And a more significant one in Catherine Barrington’s office a few days ago for which she gave you six puffs of albuterol from a ProAir MDI through a spacer. She also told me that she gave you prescriptions for a rescue inhaler, Pulimicort 180 micrograms, two inhalations twice daily, and 10 mg of Singular once a day. You started the controllers two days ago?”

“Yes.” Mac made a face that caused Dan Shivitz to chuckle. It was good to see that her aversion to taking medicine hadn't changed over the years. She shot him a glance.

“And then, today, this afternoon, you awoke from a nap with extreme chest tightness, the inability to catch your breath, significant wheezing and cough?”

“Yes. But it wasn't just a nap. I had a nightmare. I don't remember all of it, but it was very upsetting. And, the attack started in the dream. I couldn't breathe in the dream.” They discussed what had happened that afternoon, particularly her difficulty using the rescue inhaler, after which Fischer called in a nurse and handed her scripts for a nebulizer, ampules of albuterol, saline and budesonide, a spacer, a digital peak flow and FEV1 meter, and a pulse oximeter to be filled at the hospital pharmacy. 

The nebulizer and other supplies had just been delivered when Will arrived. He was dressed again in jeans and a blue sweater over a grey t-shirt, as he had been that afternoon. He looked younger than he did on TV, Dan thought. Will entered the room, and before Dan could introduce him to Fischer, walked over, sat down and took his wife into his arms. Dan gave them a moment to get situated and for Mac to reassure Will that she'd been fine while he was gone. Then, Dan cleared his throat.

“Will, this is a good friend of mine, Jon Fischer. He's a pulmonologist . . . one of the best in the city. I'm trying to get him to specialize in treating asthma, COPD and respiratory illness during pregnancy. He's agreed to consult with Catherine and me on Mac’s care.”

Will freed a hand and extended it to Fischer. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Will McAvoy,” he added needlessly.

Dan Shivitz watched the delight that played across MacKenzie’s face at Jon Fischer’ obvious and flustered pleasure at meeting News Night’s storied anchor in the flesh. Before Will arrived, Fischer had been explaining that he would turn Mac over to a respiratory therapist for a lesson on using the new equipment, but as soon as Will expressed an interest in learning about the spacer, nebulizer, peak flow meter and oximeter, the doctor immediately offered to personally instruct him in their use. 

Behind Fischer’s back, Mac and Danny rolled their eyes at each other and Mac stifled a giggle. It was wonderful, Danny thought, to see MacKenzie this happy. Had he ever seen her happy before, he pondered. For a fleeting moment, an hour or two, at most . . . maybe. He thought of a walk they had taken in the old Jewish quarter of Kabul shortly before she left. It was an unseasonably cool summer evening, he remembered, and the thought that he could consider 80 degrees cool made him smile. That night, her native curiosity and intelligence had for a short time triumphed over loss and grief, and she had lived in the present, enjoying herself and giving him a glimpse of the woman she must have been before . . . before Billy rejected her . . . before she’d lost her baby. Dan loved the memory of that evening when MacKenzie McHale had smiled at him and for a few fleeting hours, they had shared something special. He looked over at her once again, she looked older than the MacKenzie who lived in his memory, but no less beautiful. She lay tired, pale, but content, resting against Will, safe again with Billy, he thought, back where she belonged. Will sat with his arms wrapped securely around her, listening intently to Fischer, only occasionally interrupting the lessons with intelligent and relevant questions. Time Magazine had called them “American media’s ultimate power couple,” but looking at them now, Dan Shivitz didn't see power. He saw love.

 

That night Will was prepared. He'd had two conversations with Fischer after Mac had fallen asleep about what to do if an attack came during a nightmare. It had been late to call, and it sounded like Fischer had been at a party, but the guy had said to tag him anytime that Will had a question, and the doctor had not sounded the least bit unhappy at the interruption. So, Will had gotten the nebulizer ready, slid it under the bed, wrapped his arms around MacKenzie and quickly fallen into a deep dreamless sleep. 

Will awoke in the night to find a sleeping MacKenzie wrapped around him. One of her legs ran down next to his while the other was draped across his lower body. Her right arm (he had no idea what she'd done with the other one) was also resting across his body, and her long, soft fingers were closed around his erect penis. He kissed her hair thinking about how she had always slept on top of him, always covered him, always said with a cheeky smile, that one of her favorite things in life was “using you as a mattress.” It had cut him deeply to hear Jim telling Neal and Tamara about Jim’s having to sleep on the ground when they were out on maneuvers, while Mac got to turn their friend Monk “into a mattress.” He'd punished Mac for a few days after that, he recalled. Guilt washed over him as he remembered the uncomprehending hurt in her eyes at his sudden, inexplicable change of demeanor. He kissed her forehead in silent apology.

Sleeping with a woman who wasn't MacKenzie had been the hardest thing about trying to move on. He'd hated the sensation of awaking to find another woman next to him, or worse, touching him. He remembered clearly one early morning when he was trying to live with Nina, and he’d woken up to find her clutching him. The claustrophobia it had engendered started a full-scale panic attack. He’d managed to get away without awakening Nina, who slept like a rock, and found himself out on his balcony, sweating, shaking and breathing in gasps, as hot tears filled his eyes. He thought that maybe that was the moment when he started to accept what he'd always known . . . that none of it was any good. He needed to end this . . . whatever it was . . . with Nina Howard, and accept that the pain would never end because the one person he wanted but could not have . . . MacKenzie McHale . . . owned him. 

Later, after he'd started living with Mac again, he'd related the incident to Charlie, who had told him that he hadn't been able to believe that Will was so fixated on the pain of Mac’s confession that he could see no other way of life, and that Charlie had never expected that he could possibly have “fought the obvious for so fucking long.” Charlie had said that during the time Will had been with Nina, Charlie had been sick with guilt for ever bringing MacKenzie to ACN. “I never meant to subject her to what she went through,” Charlie had said. “I thought that it would take you a couple of months of working with her to see that everything you needed, everything you’d ever wanted was right there wanting you. I never imagined that you could go on denying yourself and hurting her for almost two years.” 

Charlie'd also told him that a few days after Mac saw the Page Six photo of him with Nina, Jim Harper had come unglued in Charlie’s office, accusing Charlie of being worse than Will, and caring nothing for MacKenzie. Jim had screamed that bringing her to ACN was an act of abject cruelty, and that Charlie seemed completely willing to sacrifice her to Will’s neuroses, all for the sake of doing some fucking news show. Charlie'd told Will that he’d had no answer, when Jim had asked him how he was going to do “his precious show after Will tortures Mac to death.” No shouting or ranting could have had more effect on Will than Charlie’s quiet acknowledgement of the extent of Will’s insanity and the devastation it had wrought. He’d broken down and allowed Charlie to see the depth of his remorse. Before that, only Mac had ever seen him cry . . . well, his mother and older sister, but that had been a long, long time ago. Will could still feel the way Charlie had squeezed his hand and then embraced him, forgiving all and aiming him at the future.

It was nearly dawn when Will felt his wife begin to thrash and heard her cry out. At first when he tried to hold her, she fought him off, but then she grabbed onto his arm as if she were trying to make him stay with her. Her mumbling grew louder as the dream progressed until Will could make out a little of what she was saying. Mostly, it seemed to be the words, “please” and “Charlie,” again and again. 

Mac was trembling and lying at Charlie Skinner’s feet, clutching at his legs and ankles as she had Will’s on the morning he had left her, told her to get out of his life. The only thought that she could hold was that she needed Charlie to understand, needed Charlie to know that she was sorry, that she would do it all differently if she could turn back time. But Charlie was having none of it. Righteous indignation and blind fury radiated from his face, just as it had when he'd confronted her and Sloan on the night he died. He told her that she was fired as President of ACN, and threatened to use his influence to prevail upon Will to divorce her, telling her that he should never have gone looking for her in D.C. and brought her to New York, that if he had known about the baby she had killed, he never would have counseled Will to forgive her for betraying him with Brenner. Panic and terror overwhelmed MacKenzie. She was losing everything again. She wanted to scream, to flee, to run, but as happened frequently in her nightmares, her body refused to obey her mind.

Then, she was in the hotel room in Kabul, struggling to breathe, watching the tiny baby in her arms also gasping for air, his dark blue eyes intently focused on her face. She wanted to stop his struggle, to comfort him, to tell him that she loved him, but couldn't get the words out. Suddenly, his chest stopped heaving. His eyes went dull and lifeless. Deafening silence, loss and grief greater than any she had ever experienced overwhelmed her, and she screamed.

Will held MacKenzie against him as best he could with one hand, steadying the nebulizer mask with the other. She had tried to rip it off a couple of times, but he was stronger and it had stayed in place. Then, she seemed to give up the struggle, relax a little, or at least she no longer appeared to be as aware of the mask covering her nose and mouth. His lips were near her ear and he softly sang the Beatles song, “Blackbird,” one of her favorites. Completely unexpectedly, he felt her body stiffen and then she screamed and to his shock, opened her eyes. The terror that he saw in them was almost more than he could bear. 

“Let me . . . go,” she wheezed over the sound of the compressor spewing out medicated vapor. “I . . . need . . . to find . . . Charlie . . . I need to . . . make him . . . understand . . . .” The effort of speaking triggered an extended bout of coughing.

He couldn't tell her that Charlie was dead. She wasn't fully awake, he told himself. When she woke, surely she’d remember that Charlie Skinner was gone. He started talking, rambling words, punctuated by tender kisses planted in her hair and on the back of her neck. “Kenz. I love you. You’re safe. Stay here with me . . . for a little while. Please sweetheart, just breathe. When you’re better, we’ll both go and find Charlie.”

After what seemed to him like an eternity, she spoke again. "Billy?" She blinked like someone trying to see through a fog. “Billy?”

“Yes. I'm here. I'll always be here.”

"Billy . . . I . . . I . . . ."

“Shush. Mac, don't try to talk. Just breathe in the medicine for a little while . . . until it's gone. Lean against me. Feel me breathing. Slow breaths, in and out.” When she rested against him and closed her eyes, he began to softly sing, “Every Breath You Take.” He thought he heard his wife give him a slightly strangled little chuckle.

After the nebulizer had run out of medicine, Will shut it off and removed the mask from Mac’s face. She continued to lie against him, with her eyes closed, hardly moving. “Do you want to go back to sleep?” he asked softly.

“No,” she whispered. “I want . . . need . . . to talk.”

Will gave a sigh of relief. “Okay. Whenever you’re ready.” He had vowed to himself that he wasn't going to press her to do anything that upset her, but he desperately wanted . . . needed . . . to understand what was happening. He knew of course that it had to do with the baby . . . the first baby . . . and telling him about Kabul, but maybe if he understood more, knew what images she was conjuring in her dreams, he might be able to help in some way. Or at least, with knowledge, maybe he wouldn't feel so goddamned helpless.

“The dream . . . yesterday . . . in the office . . . it was . . . I dreamt that I’d told Leona about William . . . and she became angry . . . no, contemptuous . . . and said that I'd been selfish and stupid and . . . that I shouldn't . . . have children . . . shouldn't be a mother . . . .” As she spoke, Mac’s eyes filled with tears, and her hands clutched her belly, as if she feared that someone would take Charlotte from her. Will stared at her, dumbfounded, trying to formulate a response. “I told her that it was an accident . . . that I never intended . . . never meant to harm my baby. She didn't . . . believe me. She said that maybe . . . I killed . . . killed William . . . for revenge . . . because you . . . you . . . wouldn't tolerate . . . my cheating . . . .” Now, the tears flowed freely, as she hung her head.

“Jesus Christ, MacKenzie,” Will grabbed her shoulders, “look at me. Look at me.” Her head came up slowly. “You did not kill William,” he said, emphasizing every word. “You did not kill anyone. You’re not capable of killing, and you’re not capable of revenge. You are the kindest, most loving and forgiving person I know . . . that I've ever known.” Unable to say more without breaking down, Will clutched her to him and lowered his head to kiss away her tears.

“In the dream yesterday, Leona told me that if . . . if Charlie had known what I’ve done . . . he wouldn’t have had anything to do with me . . . wouldn't have wanted . . . wanted me for his successor.” She started coughing. “Tonight . . . tonight . . . I was dreaming about Charlie. In the dream, he knew about William. He . . . he said that . . . had he known sooner, he wouldn't have brought me to News Night . . . wouldn't have told you to forgive me for Brian. He said . . . he was going to . . . advise you . . . to divorce me.” 

"My God, Mac, that's . . . that’s so far from what Charlie’s reaction would have been. It's crazy. Charlie loved you, Kenz. He would never have condemned you. You know that, don't you?” When she didn't answer, he repeated himself. “Don't you?”

She nodded haltingly.

“Kenz . . . sweetheart . . . how can we make this stop? Why are you doing this to yourself?” He knew that they were largely useless questions, but the compulsion to ask had simply overwhelmed him. 

"I don't know, Billy. I mean . . . I do . . . sort of. I've always worked my emotions out in dreams . . . and nightmares . . . especially since . . . .” She looked at him probingly. “Surely, with your keen investigative skills, you've gotten that much out of Jim.” 

"Yes, and . . . well . . . ." Will trailed off, looking miserable.

“What?” his wife asked. “Tell me.”

“It's just that Jim seems to think that I should be the cure . . . that in all of the bad nights you had in the Middle East, all you ever wanted was me, for me to forgive you, be with you . . . love you. Jim said he thought that now . . . now that we are together, it would be over. In fact, he said that you'd told him that the nightmares had stopped after we got back together.”

“You are the cure, Billy.” Mac pulled away and sat up. “Really. You can't imagine how much comfort it is to open my eyes and find you with me . . . holding me, kissing me, loving me. You must believe me. I don't know how I'd survive . . . what I'd do to stay sane . . . if I had to go through dealing with this without you.”

“You wouldn't have any of this to deal with without me,” he countered, his guilt and anguish plainly visible. MacKenzie gave him what he and Jim both called her “News Director” look.

“Well, it's true that I’d not have gotten pregnant with anyone else’s child, if that's what you mean?” It wasn't, but Will decided to accept it. “Will, I didn't start having nightmares with you. You know that. You didn't cause them, and most of the time, your being with me keeps them away. I didn't have one from Election Day until now, really. That's some sort of record. Not even through the Sandy Hook coverage when I nearly collapsed after we got that list of the children . . . .”

“Yeah, I remember. What was it about the list?”

“Their birth dates. It had the names and birth dates of the children who were murdered. Many of them were born right around . . . in the summer of 2007 . . . . They were William’s age . . . or, you know, I mean, the age he would have been.” Will nodded. “I had that one dream,” Mac continued, “right after I freaked out about trying to live at your apartment, where I dreamt that Nina had William. She told me that he didn't die . . . that he'd been taken from me because I'd hurt him . . . and she had him . . . and you. You told me that you had to stay with her because she had your son.” Will winced.

“But then, I was fine for a long time again, Billy. You know that.”

“So what changed? What happened? Was it that I went to jail?” he asked casting around for any plausible explanation. 

Mac looked at him quizzically. He could see her considering his questions for several moments, until finally her eyes grew wide as comprehension came into them. “Jail? No, not jail.” She put her hand to his cheek and smiled lovingly. “You got me pregnant, Billy . . . again.” When he said nothing, she continued. “Will, darling . . . I can't be pregnant . . . and not . . . .” She finished the sentence with a body gesture as much as by whispering the words, “. . . remember . . . and regret.”

And that was it, Will thought. It was that simple. Of course she couldn't be pregnant without the events in Kabul fighting their way into her consciousness. He looked at the swell of her belly. She had been through all of this before, alone and abandoned, unable to eat or sleep until needing to prove that she could still work, she had taken herself off to Afghanistan. It had happened. Everything he wanted so desperately to change . . . to undo . . . had happened. He looked into Mac’s eyes which seemed to be saying that there was nothing he could do about it. They were where they were right now and that’s all there was to it. And then it hit him. Yes, she was having nightmares, but where they were was pretty fucking fine, wasn't it? At the thought, a smile began in the corners of Will's mouth, as his gaze returned pointedly to his wife’s waistline. When his hands covered the ones that MacKenzie was already using to caress Charlotte, his smile broadened. Seeing it, Mac began to smile too, and when their eyes locked, they both grinned at nothing like children.

He took MacKenzie into his arms. “We will get through this. We will, Kenz. I promise. We’ll be fine. We are strong. I love you, MacKenzie. I never stopped . . . not for a heartbeat.” He kissed her, and she knew that she would lose herself completely in him for a little while, and that she would come away comforted and fortified. “Tell me what’s the best thing to do?” he asked.

 

They made love in a way that reminded Mac of their third time on “the Wedding Day.” There was “the” Wedding Day and “their” Wedding Day, although it occurred to her that really they were both their Wedding Days. She’d never told Will that “the” Wedding Day was the first time in her life that she experienced a real honest to goodness, mind-numbing orgasm, a build up and release that was beyond anything she'd ever been able to give herself. (That as a lover, Brian Brenner rated below masturbation occurred to her for a fleeting second, but she put him forcefully out of her thoughts. She didn't want to think about how stupid she had been risking her life with Will even for a second let alone for four months.) She'd had a number of orgasms the second time they’d made love, when Will started up her body by kissing her feet, but not quite the same as the big one that came over her when she gave herself up completely to his touch. The third time was unlike anything . . . ever. She remembered not being sure if she would ever again be able to sort out where her body ended and Will McAvoy’s began. She felt that way now. She’d always found the old-fashioned religious references to married couples being “one flesh” rather creepy, but lying there beside Billy, as the early August morning light entered their home, she knew that for the chosen few, it was true.

As they ate breakfast, she told him her theories of why she had cast the nightmares as she did. She didn't have much idea why she dreamt that Charlie condemned her, she told him. She imagined it was because she saw him as a father figure, Will’s father, really, and “we always want to hide our transgressions from our fathers, don't we?” She assumed that it also had to do with her feeling like she would never be able to do Charlie’s job with the same ease and grace. She did laugh when Will pointed out that it helped that Charlie was drunk all the time, although he didn't advise her taking up bourbon. 

“Leona’s easy to see . . . because of Reese.” She stopped abruptly, seeing his dumbfounded expression. She hadn't told him about Lee and Charlie and Reese so she decided to start at the beginning.

“A few months ago,” she continued, “Reese asked me if at any point in the hostile takeover madness, I'd ever asked myself why Arthur Lansing didn't name all of his children as beneficiaries of his AWM stock trust. So, I did.” 

Will looked even more confused, and then thoughtful and perplexed. “It doesn't make any sense, does it?” Will smiled sadly. “I remember when it was disclosed after Arthur died. God! Charlie . . . “. Will paused and shook his head at the memory. “Charlie was livid!”

"Um, I imagine. Breaching a contract, even if technically you’re doing it legally, wasn't exactly a vote getter in Charlie’s book.”

"Arthur breached a contract?"

“I think so. Certainly the covenant of good faith and fair dealing.”

Will started to laugh. “Where did you learn about implied contractual covenants?”

“Hey, Billy boy, you’re not the only member of this family conversant with legal terms, you know.”

"Yeah, is that so? Actually, I've never understood why Leona and Arthur had a pre-nup that essentially gave him the company if they ever divorced. That makes even less sense than cutting Reese out of his inheritance.” Mac smiled. “You know why,” her husband said slowly, seeing the cat in the creamery look on her face.

“Yes, I do. The agreement was negotiated by Leona’s father and it wasn't Arthur it was designed to keep in the marriage. It was Lee.”

“Now, you’ve really lost me.”

“You know that Leona and Charlie were in Vietnam together when Saigon fell, right?”

“Yeah. I think that everyone knows that.”

“Well, did you know that right before she was evacuated, she'd told Charlie that her father was going to disinherit her if she persisted in her intent to marry him? She also told him that she didn't care. But, I guess Charlie did, or thought she would eventually. Anyway, he tricked her to get her onto one of the evacuation helicopters by saying he’d follow, but he didn't. He stayed in Asia.”

“What does that have to do with her marriage to Arthur?”

Mac paused. “What Charlie didn't know when Lee left Saigon was that she was pregnant.”

“What? By Charlie?” Mac gave him her pained “don't be an idiot, Billy, look.” “The baby . . . what happened to the baby?”

“He grew up to be a douche on the side of the angels.” Everyone at News Night had heard about Reese’s retort to Blair when she'd called him an a douche in their last meeting.

“Reese!” 

“Don't look so shocked. Did you ever meet Arthur Lansing?

“Yeah, once or twice.”

“Did you notice that he had blue eyes and Lee has grey eyes?”

“So?”

“Will, did you flunk freshman biology? Reese’s eyes are brown . . . like his father’s.”

“Yes, of course. I'll be damned.”

“One hopes not.”

“So, Reese is Charlie’s son. How do you know this?”

“Among other things, Charlie wrote Reese a letter before he died. Nancy gave it to him a couple of weeks ago along with Charlie’s watch and some jewelry and the paper weight, Charlie’s Peabody and the bourbon decanter that used to be in his office. You haven’t been to Reese’s office in a while, I guess. There’s sort of a little shrine to Charlie in there now."

Mac explained how, according to Charlie’s letter and other things that Reese had told her, after returning to the States, Leona had defied her father’s demand that she abort Charlie’s baby, but had ultimately given in and allowed him to arrange the marriage to Lansing. The pre-nuptial agreement was part of the arrangement. It appeared that Leona’s father couldn't imagine Lansing ever wanting to jump off the gravy train, and thus, had inadvertently handed him the instrumentality of his ultimate revenge on his ex-wife, Charlie Skinner and their son. 

“So, to conclude this story,” she told Will that she thought her nightmares were driven by the fact that Leona had to have been every bit as heartsick when Charlie left her as Mac had been when Will had walked away. “You only have to look at her now to know that.” But, unlike herself, Mac explained, Leona hadn't allowed it to hurt Reese. Reese had been born healthy. Reese had lived. Lee had taken care of Reese, and Mac didn't take care of William. That, Mac explained, is what Leona says to her in the dreams.

Christ, what a fucking mess, Will thought but did not say. He knew that Lee was already distressed that she had caused a rift in her relationship with Mac by telling her that Charlie had gone to Washington in 2007. Now, she had become the vessel into which Mac was transferring all of her self-condemnation for William's early birth and death. And Lee had no idea this was happening. He wished desperately that he had Charlie to talk to. Despite Charlie’s propensity to drown his own demons in a bottle of bourbon, he could invariably provide Will with a healthy perspective on whatever situation was at hand. Will missed him desperately. Well, there was always Habib.

 

Despite both Will’s and Habib’s gentle suggestions that talking to Leona about the content of the dreams might be helpful, MacKenzie uncharacteristically continued to avoid Lee for the next three days. This required her to decline multiple invitations for lunch, for tea or just for a chat. During that time, Mac had two private sessions with Dr. Habib, plus one more with Will there, but her guilt level remained intractable and the nightmares continued. Will looked haggard from worry and having his sleep interrupted, and Mac felt exhausted in mind and body. She had remembered more of the events in Kabul, and had talked to Habib about wanting to hear what Danny could recall, but not being exactly sure how to go about it. She was sitting in her office toying with the idea of inviting both Danny and Will to see Habib with her. But she couldn't seem to develop a plan of action, or bring anything into perspective. Her concentration was scattered. Something was playing at the fringes of her mind, something unsettled, something disturbing, something she could only touch as a feeling not a memory. Something to do with Will.

This had to happen, she told herself again. She'd said as much to Will. Charlotte’s conception had made a last great confrontation with her first pregnancy inevitable. Her father had finally told her mother about their conversation, and Margaret had called to let Mac know how sorry she was about the pregnancy that had ended in a miscarriage. To her credit, Margaret had understood completely when her daughter had explained that she couldn't talk about it with her right now, that she couldn't really talk about it with anyone but Will and Habib because all of the energy she possessed was being directed to helping Will and processing what had happened.

“He's not angry, is he, darling?” Margaret’s voice had sounded purposefully confident that the answer would be, no.

“No, Mummy. Sad. And . . . guilty,” Mac had replied in a voice that broke her mother’s heart.

Will’s guilt fed on her guilt. She knew it, but felt powerless to stop either of them. He'd gone, she knew despite his attempts to hide it, from ignoring her voice messages and emails to obsessively and repeatedly reading and listening to them, especially the ones she’d left him from Kabul. This thought unsettled her like a dark shadow passing quickly through her mind. The thing she was trying to remember, it must have something to do with the voice messages . . . and, then, suddenly, she had it. Not the messages themselves, it was something Will had said on the morning she had found him at his computer, listening to her saying good-bye when she thought she was bleeding to death. He'd said something about Nina and the take-down piece he'd almost bribed her to kill. What was it? Mac had been so confused and undone seeing him there, realizing that he was listening to her messages from Kabul, that it had gone right out of her head. 

He'd asked her if she'd taken pills. That was it! Nina had information or a source that had made Nina think . . . tell Will . . . that Mac had tried to commit suicide when she was in the Middle East. How could that be? Who would have said such a thing? None of the guys in the unit would have talked about her to a gossip columnist. She felt sure of that. Someone in the CNN crew? That seemed as unlikely. She turned the question over and over in her mind, ignoring all of the work piled up on her desk. Shit! She knew herself well enough to know that she wouldn't rest or be able to think about anything else until she found out, so she called her husband and asked him if he was free for a little while.

Will didn't know much more than what he'd already told her. Nina had intimated she had evidence that Mac had been suicidal during her time in the Middle East, and willing to get the rest of her crew killed along with herself. That angered MacKenzie. But the fact that Billy had torn up a $50,000 check after Nina had made him think of his News Night crew by referring to herself as a journalist had made Mac smile. But it didn't give her the answers that she sought. 

Back in her office, MacKenzie stared at the name she had called up from her contacts list. Her finger trembled as she tried to bring it down on the screen to place the call. What am I afraid of, she asked herself. I'm the President of Atlantis Cable News. I'm Mrs. William McAvoy. I'm going to be the mother of Will’s child. Taking a deep breath and hearing a slight wheeze, she opened her desk drawer and took a puff of her inhaler. Treat this call like she'd been instructed to treat exercise, she told herself. There was no shame in that. She waited a few minutes and then took another puff of medicine. Breathing in again, she felt clear and strong. Okay, she said to herself, and brought her finger down on the number under the name, “Nina Howard.”


	13. What The Hell

What the hell. Just as MacKenzie decided that if Nina didn’t answer she would not leave a message, “the line,” as she still thought of it, engaged. 

“Hello.” Nina’s voice sounded tentative. Mac wondered if she always answered her phone that way, or if Nina still had her number in her contacts list and she’d appeared on Nina’s caller ID. 

“Nina, it's MacKenzie. McKenzie McHale.”

"MacKenzie!" It was said in three distinct syllables. “To what do I owe the honor of this call?” There was an unmistakable note of strain behind the forced gaiety. Before Mac could reply, Nina went on, "and just let me say how sorry I was to hear about Charlie.” I bet you were, Mac replied to Nina in her mind, Charlie’s death happened a little late for you to get any benefit from it. Mac thought of a conversation she’d had with Charlie during Will’s "Nina phase" in which Skinner had confessed that he knew Nina was trying to drive a wedge between him and Will, but that he was so pissed at Will that he just couldn't stop himself from playing right into her hands. 

Suddenly, Mac didn't want to engage in social chit chat with Nina Howard. “Nina,” she began, “the reason for my call is that a few years ago, you made it known that you were looking for corroboration that I'd been suicidal in . . . Pakistan, I guess . . . I imagine that the story you were chasing went something along the lines that I'd been trying to die when I got stabbed and was willing to endanger my crew to do it. You told someone who told Gary Cooper . . . .”

“Is that really his name?” Nina interrupted a little too jovially.

“You know it is, and you can't imagine how sick I am of that line,” Mac said in a flat authoritative voice that wiped the smile right off Nina’s face. Suddenly Nina felt very much that she was talking to the President of Atlantis Cable News. This wasn't insecure MacKenzie, looking to be friends, and wanting to protect Will. 

“I would very much appreciate it if you would give me . . . “ MacKenzie said, pausing almost imperceptibly, “. . . copies of what you have on me in the Middle East.” When Nina didn't respond, after a moment or two, Mac went on. “I will trade you a statement that you can use if you ever run the story . . . .”

“I'll never run the story!” Nina blurted out, sounding almost breathless. Then she seemed to recover and collect herself. When she spoke again it was with total gossip columnist vibrato, “I don't really have much, to be honest, Mac. I can't imagine why you'd care about what I have.” Could that be true, Mac asked herself. It was true that Will had very little knowledge of the specifics of what Nina had. Mac gave voice to this observation. “But you had to have something, Nina, what if he'd asked for proof before agreeing to make his . . . .” Again, Mac paused just the slightest bit. “. . . investment. I'm sure you had some idea what you’d give him.” Mac paused yet again to give Nina a chance to reply. When she remained silent, MacKenzie concluded, “that's what I want.”

“You'd be surprised, MacKenzie. He didn't ask. They rarely do. In fact, I’ve found that the vaguer I keep the description of what sort of story I’d run, the more willing they are to invest.”

Mac felt sick to her stomach. “Nina, I need to know who’s spreading rumors about me.”

“And that's just what they are, Mac, rumors. Like I said, there wasn't enough there to run with.” That would be a first, Mac thought. Blackmail’s okay, but Nina draws the line at running a single source takedown piece. This is a power trip, Mac concluded. She'd just put Nina in the position of having something that she wants, something that Nina can deny her. She plugged back into the conversation just as Nina was saying, “. . . . don't even know if I could find the stuff I had back then.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, Nina! Haven't you fucked me over enough for one lifetime? You lied to me about the contents of Will’s message! You lied to him about why I'd called! You slept with my husband! You gave . . . I don't know . . . documents . . . information . . . about me to Jerry Dantana!”

Nina felt her hackles rise, as she fixated on Mac’s saying she had slept with her husband. But even as she felt her anger flood her senses, Nina knew that it was true. She'd had affairs with married men a couple of times, and that's just what being with Will had always felt like. No matter what he said about things with MacKenzie being over, he was a married man, separated maybe, but married just the same. And, to make matters worse, as she'd always known because she'd heard his voice with her own ears, Will had been a married man who was still desperately in love with his wife. But fuck it! Will was a big boy. It wasn't like she had stolen him from MacKenzie like the fucking family silver. 

As if reading her mind, Mac began to speak again, “And don't think for a moment that I believe that your actions in any way absolve Will of 100 percent of the responsibility for your . . . relationship,” Mac finished, charitably replacing the word “affair” which she had started to say. Slowly, the rage died out of MacKenzie’s voice, and ACN’s President returned. “Anyway, Nina, you have nothing to gain from keeping information from me. I'm going to see what you have in any event. There are allegations in Jerry’s complaint that are just too close to what Will remembers you saying to him to be coincidental, and Jerry’s going to turn over every shred of paper and every electronic copy he's got of anything that formed the basis of his complaint or in any way concerns anyone at AWM or ACN. He’s giving it all to Leona’s counsel, Rebecca Halliday. He's doing it in return for Lee not going after him for costs. So, you see, even if I have to go through everything he gives us to find it, I’m eventually going to get to see what you gave him,” Mac concluded. 

There was a long silence. Finally, Nina spoke. Her voice sounded old and tired. “I didn't give anything, documents or information, to Jerry Dantana.”

“You seriously expect me to believe that?” Mac countered immediately. But there was something in Nina’s voice that held the ring of truth. Could it be that they were all just shooting in the dark and happened to hit something. She heard her father’s voice caution, “you may well be the only person in this conversation, Mackie, who knows that they did indeed hit something. Mind how you go.”

Nina, for her part, was suddenly gripped by a great need to have MacKenzie believe that she had not aided Jerry Dantana. “Jerry gave it to me . . . “ Nina said. “Or to be precise, Jerry gave the information to Reese Lansing, who gave it to me.”

Mac felt rocked by that. Rocked to the core. But, she reminded herself forcefully, Nina was not referring to Reese, her friend, but to the Reese of two years before who had opposed the changes she wanted to make in News Night. 

"When I met with Will to solicit his . . . um . . . investment, I only had Lansing’s description of what I was going to get from Dantana, and I assumed that it had to do with why CNN pulled you out of the Middle East so suddenly.”

“And what did you get?” MacKenzie repeated the question into the silence. “Nina, what did you get from Dantana?”

“The statement of Alexander Armstrong.” Nina sounded reluctant and defeated.

Baffled, Mac repeated the name as a question, “Alexander Armstrong? I . . . I can't recall ever meeting anyone by that name.” Mac didn't know exactly what to make of things, but she felt more confident that whatever Nina thought she had was not actually a threat. “I'm sure that whomever he is, Mr. Armstrong couldn't possibly know me well enough to be qualified to opine on my emotional health. Does he claim to have met me in Pakistan?”

Again silence. "Jesus Christ, Nina! You are making this like pulling teeth! You say you won't run the story, so what leverage are you going for here? Just tell me who the hell Armstrong is, why he claims to know something about me, then email me a copy of his statement, and you’ll never hear from me again. But for God’s sake, stop playing games.”

Quietly, Nina spoke, “Alex Armstrong is . . . or was when he gave the statement . . . an assistant manager at a hotel, the name of which I don't recall, in D.C. I think he'd been a source for Dantana before Lansing put out the word that there’d be points for anyone who could give him something on you.” Nina paused. “In 2007, Armstrong was working at the Intercontinental . . . .” Nina heard the sharp intake of breath that Mac couldn't control, and stopped speaking. “Mac, . . . I . . . .”

“What Intercontinental, Nina?” There was strain and sharpness in the question. “Please don't make me ask again.”

“The Intercontinental in Kabul, Afghanistan. Armstrong was the Assistant Manager. He was called to your room . . . .” 

Nina knew! Nina knew about William. She had known all of these years. Mac felt her hands start to go numb and her breathing hitch. No you don't, she silently commanded her body, don’t you dare betray me now. 

“And, you never gave Armstrong’s statement to Will?” Mac found herself asking even though she knew the answer. “Why not?”

“Well, at first, I assumed that he knew. The timing . . . I figured that you’d had your . . . time . . . Brenner called it a reconciliation . . . with him, accidentally gotten pregnant, and Will found out about it. He couldn't stand to take you back and raise Brenner’s kid, and his pro-life views wouldn't let him go along with, let alone suggest, an abortion. So, even though he was crazy about you, Will broke it off. The theory seemed to fit the facts. Then, Brenner showed up as Will’s official biographer, and asked to interview me about New Year's Eve and I agreed if he'd answer a few questions for me.” 

Mac felt her heart stop and then literally skip a beat. Did Brian know about the baby? Please, God, no! She tried to swallow which only served to set off a fit of coughing. 

“Mac? God, MacKenzie, let's stop this. I'll send it to you . . . Armstrong’s statement.”

“Did you?” The words were strangled. “Nina, did . . . you?” Mac coughed again. “Did you . . . show Brian . . . .”

“No! No! I didn't show him or tell him! He doesn't know about . . . anything . . . at least not from me. Please Mac, you must believe me,” Nina begged. “When I met with him, I still thought maybe I had a story . . . I wasn't going to tell him what I knew.” That, Mac thought gratefully, had the ring of truth about it. “And after we spoke for a little while, I knew that . . . my theory had been wrong. I asked Brenner about your break-up with Will and he told me that Will was an asshole, who’d rejected you for something you'd done years before. Brenner said that before Will invited him in to write the article, he hadn't seen you in since 2005.”

“And, you never told . . . any of this to Will.” Although it was not a question, there was confusion in Mac’s voice. How could Nina have known this and not told the man she . . . loved? . . . was purporting to love? Had Nina claimed to love Will? Mac realized that she didn't know.

“And send him running to you?” Nina gave a momentary laugh that sounded brittle to Mac’s ears. “No, MacKenzie, I never told Will.” Mac had never thought that running to her would have been Will’s reaction. But then, what did she think Will’s reaction would have been if Nina had shown him Armstrong’s statement, which she now assumed described the scene he'd encountered when summoned to her room. How long could Will have gone before the need to know if it had been his child would have compelled him to ask her? Not long, she thought. Would he have believed her answer? She didn't know. Forcefully, she turned her thoughts back to the present.

“I need to see what Armstrong said,” Mac told Nina as calmly as she could make herself speak. “My email is mackenzie.mchale, or just mmmm, @acn.com. Either one will reach me. Will you email it to me, Nina?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.” After a pause, MacKenzie asked the other question that was troubling her. “Nina, what did you say to Reese?” Somehow even as she asked, she knew the answer. Reese didn't know.

“I told him that Jerry had his head up his ass and there wasn't anything there . . . no story. You know, he didn't appear to care or even remember so it wasn't a very long conversation.”

They seemed to have nothing more to say to each other, and so the silence stretched on. Finally, MacKenzie ended it.

“Thank you, Nina . . . for not running the story. I greatly appreciate your discretion.”

There was a pause as though Nina Howard was trying to decide on a response. Then, she simply said, “you’re welcome.” Another pause, and then, “oh, and MacKenzie . . . Congratulations on . . . everything . . . the baby, the job . . . Will. You deserve it.” 

The call disconnected so quickly that Mac didn't think Nina’d heard her say, “Thank you.”

Two minutes later, the email appeared in Mac’s inbox. Still preferring print on paper, she made herself a copy of the attachment, and began reading. 

The piece of paper in MacKenzie McHale’s hands shook violently and beyond her control. She needed to breathe, to stop the ringing in her ears. She needed to move. She thought about going down to the AWM workout room and trying to exercise her emotions back under control. She felt violated, enraged, mortified and indescribably sad. It was all there . . . down in black and white . . . how they had found her, half-naked and mostly dead, lying in an expanding pool of blood, after the maid had let herself into the room and then run screaming down the hallway. The bloody sheets and the baby’s body were described, even down to the fact that the umbilical cord was still attached to the placenta, and the body was partially wrapped in a t-shirt. 

Charlotte jumped violently inside of her. Will! Dear God, how would Will react to reading this? Whatever images he'd conjured up from what she'd been able to tell him about the time shortly before and after William’s birth could be nothing, nothing like this. But she couldn't hide it from him. She had to tell him. He had every right to know that Nina knew, and that Dantana and his lawyers had read this.

God damn Reese! She'd be facing none of this without his all points request for information with which to screw her. Fuck him! How dare he do this to her! Suddenly, the thought that Reese was blissfully unaware of what his actions had set in motion enraged her almost past the breaking point. Without thinking, she strode from her office, telling a startled Millie that she wasn't sure when she would be back.

 

“I didn't read it.”

“I know you didn't read it! You couldn't have sat in my apartment, on my bathroom floor, watching me being sick with Charlotte, and been the way you were if you'd read it. No. You just gave it to Nina Fucking Howard!” Mac’s anger flared again. He might as well have had her stripped naked in the streets.

Before it registered what she was doing, Mac thrust the piece of paper at Reese. "This is what you gave her, you bastard! Read it! Read it now, Reese,” she hissed, surprising herself. He looked irritated. His defensive face, she thought. But he grabbed the paper out of her hand before she could retract her demand. 

At first, she saw confusion, and watched as his eyes tracked up to re-read something. Then, his jaw, initially still clenched in irritation, began to slacken, as shock and then horror claimed his face. She heard him breathing harder, until he was inhaling and exhaling like someone who was sick to his stomach. Finally, his brows knit together, his mouth opened further, and he blinked rapidly, as his eyes came up to meet hers.

“Mac . . . My God . . . I . . . I . . . . I gave this . . . to Nina Howard?” He shook his head before she could answer. “Don't answer. I know I did. Back then, I was so . . . so jealous of you. I was afraid you were just going to take him away . . . .”

“What are you talking about? Jealous? Why? Of whom? Whom would I take away?”

“Will. He was really . . . kind of my only friend. Then you came along and . . . he couldn't see anything or anyone else . . . couldn't seem to care about anyone else’s opinion . . . and then Charlie went on this crusade to keep him from caring about ratings . . . It felt like he was supposed to stop caring about me, and I thought that was your doing.” He looked at Mac, silently imploring her to understand and forgive. “I wanted you to go . . . go away . . . so everything would be back to being the way it was.” He looked away. “I'm sorry,” he whispered.

If Reese had been anything but so brutally honest, she might have been able to sustain her anger. Instead, MacKenzie felt all of the rage and adrenalin-driven energy drain from her body. Suddenly, she felt enervated, almost in danger of having her knees buckle under her weight. Cradling her belly, she sank slowly into one of the chairs facing Reese’s desk, her eyes still fixed on his face. 

She saw him . . . the little boy, dark and small for his age . . . rejected implicitly, or perhaps explicitly, she wasn't sure, by his grandfather and the man he believed to be his father. He had never been good enough for them. That must have been how it had seemed to him . . . how any child would see it. And then, that rejected little boy thought that his one friend was being turned against him. Slowly, she shook her head, as it all sank in. It didn't excuse what he'd done, just like her understanding of the childhood forces that had driven Will to hurt her didn't excuse his actions. But it did enable her to forgive.

Slowly, Reese turned back to her, guilt and pain openly on display in his face. “I had no idea . . . anything like this . . . . Why did CNN send you to Afghanistan if you were pregnant?”

“No one at CNN knew. No one knew.” There was no anger behind her words now, only exhaustion.

“No one?”

“I never told him. I never got the chance. It was an accident. At first, I couldn't believe that I'd gotten pregnant . . . although . . . “ she chuckled ironically, “we'd been so bad about birth control for months I don't know what I expected to happen.”

Reese nodded. He'd known in his bones while he was reading Armstrong’s words that it had been Will’s baby, dead on that hotel room floor, and now it was confirmed. Would . . . could their friendship survive Will’s learning that he had provided the genesis for Dantana’s obtaining Armstrong’s statement? Would Will ever forgive him for passing it along to Nina Howard to publish a story that was intended drive Mac from ACN? But as soon as the questions crossed his mind, he dismissed them quickly. This wasn't about him. This was about Mac. 

“I don't understand,” Reese said gently. “How could you not have told him?” Before she could answer, he went on. “And another thing I don't understand,” he said, gesturing to where the copy of Armstrong’s statement had fallen onto his desk blotter, “why were you alone when the maid came in? Someone had to have been with you when . . . .”

What the hell, MacKenzie thought for the second time that day. Taking a deep breath to steady herself, she began speaking. Reese said very little, but at one point, early on, he'd pushed a button on his phone that signaled to his assistant, Phyllis, that his calls and any visitors were to be held. MacKenzie started where it had begun. She went back to Christmas 2006 and New Year’s 2007, which had been spent “displaying how crazy Will and I were about each other to both of our families, and talking marriage and how we felt about having kids.” 

So much like the holiday season just past, Mac reflected, with marriage plans and talk of a family. Although she should have expected it, she’d been stunned into silence when Will had turned to her one night in bed, his hair still tousled and spiky from her hands raking through it as she writhed in ecstasy under his mouth, and asked, “you always said . . . before . . . Kenz, do you still want kids?” How could she answer that question? Tell him that the ability to give him a child had almost certainly drained away years before, a stain on a hotel room carpet. Lie, and blame it on the knife wound. Either would have shattered his sleepy, post-coital bliss. 

Then, Mac had remembered being nine or ten and with her father in an embassy car in bumper to bumper traffic on Wisconsin Avenue. They’d started talking about how to decide what to say in a highly charged, high stakes situation. “Reach into your mind and heart, Mackie, and find the truest, simplest truth. Strip it of judgments and extraneous detail. Then, decide whether saying it is appropriate for the situation. I think you’ll be surprised how often it is.” 

And so she had looked into Will's eyes and said, "I’ve never stopped wanting your child, Billy. Not for one day, not for one moment of these past six years.” He’d said nothing more, just nuzzled her neck and wrapped his body around hers, and fell quickly asleep. MacKenzie had lain awake for a long time, listening to his smooth even breathing, hot tears collecting and spilling from the corners of her eyes as she thought about what she was going to have to tell him.

She brought herself back to the present and caressed Charlotte, feeling that overwhelming love tinged with fear that frequently accompanied thoughts of her unborn daughter. Her reward was a sharp kick in the kidney. 

“Ouch! God,” she gasped, “I don't think Charlie’s little namesake in here is going to have any interest in journalism. I think she wants to be a footballer.”

“You mean soccer player, don't you, Mac?” Reese teased.

Mac made a face at him. Then, turning serious once again, she continued her story. A few weeks later, around the beginning of February, she had awakened one morning feeling sick to her stomach. Other symptoms started showing up and after another few weeks had passed, she took a half dozen home pregnancy tests.

“Multiple source confirmation, Mac?” Reese teased her again with the hint of a smile. He realized that he was interrupting the flow of her story, but he was desperate to dissipate some of the tension, especially as they both knew where and how the tale would end. Christ! Reese tried to shake off the images Armstrong’s narrative had conjured in his mind.

“I couldn't believe it,” she replied. “But then, it started to sink in, and I realized that I needed to tell Will he was going to be a father.” This, she explained, brought up the fact that she'd never told Will that a few weeks after they'd become lovers, Brian Brenner, the man she'd been with for the previous three years . . . .

“Wait! Wait!” Reese interrupted, clearly confused. “Brian Brenner . . . the reporter? Newsweek?” Mac nodded, but it didn't seem to resolve anything for Reese. “You were with Brenner for three years? The Brian Brenner that Will chose to write the now infamous New York Magazine article?” 

Mac nodded again. “For three years, during most of which I thought I wanted to marry Brenner. I'd convinced myself that my love for Brian was real and eternal, even after he broke things off and ran for the hills.” She looked at poor Reese, absorbing shock after shock today. “You never knew. Will never told you?”

“What the fuck? Why did he . . . pick Brenner?” Reese trailed off, thinking about the immediate aftermath of the publication and Will’s drinking and medicating himself to death’s door.

“Let’s just say that that’s a conversation for another day,” Mac said in a way that made Reese nod and be quiet, but then she continued. “Two possible explanations. One is that Will hadn't heard me when I told him that the last time I was with Brian I’d said that I never wanted to see him again because I'd fallen in love with Will McAvoy. Either that, or Will significantly underestimated Brian’s capacity to nurse a grudge.”

Reese sighed and said nothing. And so Mac told him the circumstances surrounding her reconciliation with Brenner, as Nina had called it, and Will’s reaction to her disclosure of it two years later, his shutting down, freezing her out, and leaving Washington without a word. Reese remained silent after a whispered, “Christ, Mac.”

She thought for a while that she was going to get through it all without a major breakdown. She was calm describing her attempts to communicate with Will in the weeks after “the breakfast,” her sinking career, and the insomnia and inability to eat that followed Will’s departure from CNN and return to New York. At some point, Reese got up from his desk, walked to the chair next to MacKenzie’s, sat down, and simply took one of her hands in his. He didn’t rush her. He didn't ask questions. He waited when she fell silent, absorbed in her own thoughts.

However, when she started talking about the events in the hotel room in Kabul, she felt a grief so haunting and palpable that she thought if she reached out William’s little body might be there, in front of her, near enough to touch. She felt the “attack” starting but was powerless to stop her body from reacting. Her fingers began to tingle, as her heartbeat started to pound in her ears. She stopped talking, and sweat broke out on her upper lip and between her breasts. Her breathing became rapid and shallow. After a couple of moments of hyperventilation, her breathing turned wheezy, and her chest tightened. She inhaled in gasps, as it took more and more effort from her diaphragm muscles to force air out of her lungs.

She didn't see Reese’s expression change from questioning to concerned. Neither was she aware that he had let go of her hand, risen from his chair and moved closer. She only became aware of him when he hunkered down in front of her and reached again for her hand. 

"My God, Mac," she heard him say, "you’re asthmatic.”

She almost denied it. She wanted to say, no, but then a little voice in her head told her that it was time to grow the fuck up. Where had this Wonder Woman Complex come from? Why did she always feel that she needed to be the healthiest, strongest, most self-sufficient person in the room?

“Millie . . . “ she gasped. “Call . . . Millie . . . ask her to find . . . in the top right-hand drawer . . . of my desk . . . red inhaler . . . and a . . . plastic tube-looking . . . thing . . . . Ask her to bring them . . . here.”

He was already on the phone to her secretary before she finished speaking. “. . . and you should also see a spacer in there. It's a tube . . . oh okay, yeah, great, . . . thanks.” Reese hung up and returned to Mac.

“Breathe slowly,” he instructed, once again crouching in front of her. “You don't have to completely fill or empty your lungs, Mac, in order to get enough oxygen. It's just the panicked feeling that you can't breathe that makes you think you do, but when you force your breathing, it makes the constriction worse. So, slow shallow breaths, okay? Millie will be here before you know it." 

MacKenzie didn't think to ask how Reese knew so much about asthma. She just held his hand and tried to do as he said. But the panic she was feeling was coming from more than the inability to breathe. 

“Sometimes . . . I go back,” she tried to explain. “It . . . it’s hard . . . to control . . . .”

She was interrupted by a sharp knock on the door. Reese raced over and opened it only enough to grab the inhaler from Millie. Then seeing her face, he whispered, “she's fine. Mac’s okay,” and allowed Millie to put her head into the room to see for herself that Mac was sitting up in a chair.

“Okay, Mac, I've got it,” Reese said, closing the office door and returning to her chair. “You can do four puffs, but I always hate the trembling that sometimes brings on, and your heart’s racing as it is. So let’s start with two puffs and four breaths from the spacer. Just hold it and breathe. I'll push the canister down.”

She did as he suggested, and after a couple of minutes, felt the constriction in her chest start to ease. “Sorry about that,” she apologized. 

“Nothing to be sorry about. I'm the one who should be apologizing . . . still apologizing. You sound better. Sit quietly for a moment. Keep on with slow shallow breaths. See if you need another puff. Do you want to stop? Talking . . . about it, I mean.”

Mac thought about that. Did she? She'd stormed into Reese’s office in a rage and started down this road without really thinking. But suddenly she realized that she didn't want to stop. She didn't want to leave Reese with just Armstrong’s words, with just the blood and gore part of the story. She wanted to tell him that there had been William . . . that she had held her son, if only for a little while . . . that he'd been a valiant little fighter . . . just like another valiant little fighter, she thought, who despite the damage, had not let an abusive father destroy him. 

And, so she kept on talking. She told Reese all of it. He sat silently holding her hand. Only interrupting to suggest that she take another puff or two from the inhaler. 

“Will knows all of this?” Reese asked when she was done. She nodded. “About the messages?”

“He kept them. Now, he listens to them . . . “ Mac shook her head, “. . . too much . . . too often.”

Reese’s phone buzzed. He ignored it. “Will must be insane with guilt.”

“It's hard on him . . . “ Another buzz of the phone interrupted Mac. “He takes more on himself than he should.”

“You’re amazing, Mac.”

“I don't feel amazing. I feel guilty. Damned guilty. I was stupid and self-absorbed, and I didn't care for . . . my health properly. Consequently, my child paid the price.”

The phone buzzed two more times while she was speaking. Reese stood, irritation plain on his face, strode to his desk, and snapped on the speaker. “Phyllis,” he said sharply, “I indicated that I was not to be disturbed.” He started to disconnect when Phyllis’ voice stopped him.

"Reese!" The tone was at once, maternal, commanding, desperate and pleading. “Reese,” she repeated almost in a whisper, “I have both Mr. McAvoy and Mrs. Lansing out here now.”

Reese and MacKenzie looked at each other in shock and horror like children whose hiding place had been discovered by the adults. Then, simultaneously, they burst out laughing.

“By all means, Phyllis,” Reese said, chuckling and slowly shaking his head, “send them in.”


	14. Mr. Armstrong's Statement

Reese saw the inhaler coming at him from the corner of his eye and got his hand up to catch it barely in time. “Put that in your desk . . . please. I don't want Will to see . . . .” Mac’s voice was cut off by the opening of the office door, and Reese had just closed his drawer when his mother and Will McAvoy walked in.

“Well, isn't this a pleasant surprise,” Reese said jovially. “What brings you two here . . . together?”

Will started to describe running into Leona outside Mac's office during his hunt for his wife, saying that not finding her in her office, he'd forced out of Millie the information that Mac had left with a piece of paper in her hand and smoke coming out of her ears, saying only that she was going “upstairs.” Just then, Leona Lansing held up her hand, signaling him to let her speak. But instead of answering her son, Lee dropped into the chair Reese had vacated and turned to Mac.

“MacKenzie, whatever I've done to make you angry or upset, I'm truly sorry. I never thought that hearing that Charlie had gone looking for you in Washington would be so distressing to you . . . I'm so sorry that I delayed him." 

Mac gaped. Mrs. Lansing was apologizing to her. Not just apologizing, but apologizing and visibly upset. “I don't understand,” Mac began. “I'm not angry with you, Mrs. Lansing. Why . . . why would you think . . . . that?”

"For starters, because you just called me Mrs. Lansing instead of Lee. Because, Mac, you’ve turned down every invitation I've extended, and avoided me like the plague for the last few weeks.”

“Oh, God!” Mac buried her face in her hands and spoke through her fingers, as Will moved over to her chair and began gently rubbing her shoulders. “I've been having nightmares lately . . . terrible nightmares . . . and I've cast you as the villain. Well, not the villain exactly . . . more the voice of my deepest guilt. You tell me how weak and selfish I was . . . how disappointed Charlie would have been if he'd known what I'd done.”

Leona made a sound that indicated that she was thoroughly perplexed, so Mac added, “I haven't been able, you see, to face you in the daylight,” and raised her head to look at the older woman.

“I still don't understand,” Leona said simply. “I mean, I hear your words and I know what you’re saying, but I don't get it. What have you done? I don't understand.”

But her son did. Or at least he understood that there was a connection between the dreams and Mac’s search for the information that Nina had alluded to in her conversation with Will . . . the search that had led her to obtain Armstrong’s statement and come storming into his office. 

Mac sighed and looked up at Will, who nodded, indicating that she should tell Leona what had been going on. “Reese knows,” Mac said quietly. “I just told him.” If Will was surprised, he didn't show it. He simply nodded again, and planted what Reese thought might be the tenderest kiss he had ever witnessed on his wife’s forehead. Then, he sat on the arm of her chair.

Mac turned to Leona. “I gave birth prematurely to a baby boy in June of 2007. He didn't live. He probably wouldn't have lived no matter where we'd been . . . but we were in Afghanistan, so he didn't have any chance at all.”

“June. That's when . . . when . . . Charlie . . . went . . . ,” Leona stuttered. Then she looked at Will. “When did you come back to New York?”

“The beginning of April,” he replied in a tight flat voice.

Neither of them said anything further, and so Mac spoke again. “I was pregnant when I told Will I'd been with Brian . . . my ex-boyfriend,” Mac added hastily, realizing that like Reese, his mother might not know the identity of the man with whom she'd cheated on Will. “Brian had been my first serious relationship. He broke up with me . . . said I smothered him . . . shortly after I got the job at CNN. After Will and I made the papers a few times, Brian came back . . . said he wanted to marry me.” Leona snorted a derisive laugh. “Yeah,” Mac agreed. “I was young, or at least, stupid. I saw Brian behind Will’s back for most of the first four and a half months after we started dating . . . after we'd become lovers,” Mac said simply. “When I fell in love with Will . . . or, perhaps I should say, when I allowed myself to experience the fact that I was in love with Will, I sent Brian away, and never saw him again. That way,” she added almost under her breath, which tickled Reese. Mac obviously didn't want to get into the whole New York Magazine business by identifying the circumstances under which she’d next seen Brian, but she couldn't stand to create a misimpression.

“Anyway, the holidays in 2006, when Will and I had been together for two years, were something of an orgy of recklessness. I'd switched to a supposedly lower dose birth control pill but it and I did not get on, so we . . . Will and I . . . decided I should just throw the rest away and we'd use something from the chemist . . . drugstore.”

“You didn't care if she got pregnant, did you?” Leona asked Will.

“No.”

“Did you want it to happen?”

Will paused. “Yes.”

Mac stared up at him, lost for a time in that admission. “When I realized that I was pregnant, I assumed we'd move up our wedding plans because of the baby. I thought that a marriage has to be built on honesty, and, to be completely honest now,” Mac turned and spoke to Will, “I was afraid . . . I didn't want you to find out later . . . and Brian was . . . is . . . enough of a shit to make sure that you’d learn about it some day.” Will nodded slowly, and wondered how he had ever convinced himself that she'd chosen to disclose her relationship with Brian after nearly two years of silence as a vehicle for breaking up with him.

Since their exchange a moment before, Leona Lansing’s piercing stare had remained on Will, and she seemed lost in concentration. After a second’s hesitation, she spoke slowly and deliberately. “You left her, knowing she was pregnant, because she confessed to screwing around with an ex-boyfriend for a little while when you two were getting started?” she asked, unable to mask completely the incredulity in her eyes and in her voice.

Will froze. His eyes locked onto Leona’s as Mac’s found Reese’s, and for a long time, no one spoke. No one even breathed. “I don't know,” Will mumbled in a barely audible whisper. “I don't remember.”

“No!” Mac almost shouted the word and it came out in two syllables. “He didn't know I was pregnant! He didn't know anything about it until recently. I never got the chance to tell him! After I said I had slept with Brian, Will was too upset to hear anything I was saying.” Only Reese saw the desperation on Mac’s face while she spoke. Leona and Will remained locked together. Finally, she broke their silent communion with a tiny supportive nod. 

Leona knew the basic outline of the events from Charlie, how Will had gone into a deep depression and shut down after Mac’s confession of infidelity, although they'd both assumed that Mac's transgression had occurred well into the relationship, close to the time of her disclosure. Charlie had told Lee when he insisted on hiring Will back, that Will wanted to return to New York because contract extension negotiations with CNN had broken down, and Mac had broken up with Will and returned to an ex-boyfriend. Later, Charlie came to her with the truth, as he'd discovered it, saying that Mac was apparently trying desperately to communicate with Will, but he was refusing to see her or respond to her calls, texts and emails, and that Will had paid a fortune to get out of his contract with CNN, and then had packed up without a word to MacKenzie, returned to New York, and asked Charlie for a job. 

“How does this tie into a dream in which I'm telling you that you are . . . what did you say? . . . weak and selfish? You didn't have an abortion. Not that that should make you feel guilty, weak or selfish, but you said you gave birth in Afghanistan, I'm sure of that.”

“No, I didn't have an abortion. I killed William much more indirectly than that.”

“Wait. William?” Leona looked at Will and nearly wept for the grief she saw in his eyes. “That was the baby’s name,” she finished softly. Mac nodded. “I still don't understand, why do you say you killed him?” Out of the corner of her eye, Lee saw Will wince visibly at the question. 

“Because I did,” Mac said, looking Leona unflinchingly in the eyes. “After Will left Washington, I fell apart. Completely. Before that, I’d kept myself going by believing that he'd calm down enough to be willing to talk to me . . . face to face, I'd hoped . . . and that I'd be able to convince him that I loved him, that I'd never meant to hurt him, that I'd never be unfaithful again . . . that I'd never have been under any other circumstances. I thought that I could talk to Will, and he'd take a chance on trusting me again, and then I'd tell him about the baby. But after he left CNN, I knew it wasn't going to happen that way. I knew he was gone. He was done with me. I'd destroyed his trust and I was never getting it back.” 

Leona reached for one of MacKenzie’s hands and clasped it in both of hers. It was the first time they had touched in such an intimate way, and Mac looked down at their joined hands and said nothing for several seconds. Eventually, she laid her other hand over Leona’s. Then, she spoke again. “I didn't think that anything could hurt like that. It was utter and complete desolation. I couldn't think. I couldn't function. I was immobilized.”

“You hid this from your doctor?” It almost didn't sound like a question.

“For a long time . . . yes.” Mac sighed. “In the beginning, I could pass it off as the effects of morning sickness.” Mac laughed a little. “Hell, some of it was the effects of morning sickness.” Leona smiled, and Reese observed that memories of nausea seemed to be one of those things that all women who had ever been pregnant shared. “Eventually, though,” Mac continued, stilling focusing on the four hands in her lap, “when I kept losing weight instead of gaining it, and I couldn't hide the dark circles around my eyes with make-up anymore, he figured out that I wasn't eating or sleeping. He lectured me on my responsibility to the life I carried, said repeatedly that I owed it to my baby to take better care of myself. Finally, he threatened to put me in hospital, but I begged him not to, and he agreed to wait and see if I could gain some weight on my own. I think he gave me two weeks. My oh so mature response was to run away.” Mac looked up at Leona. “I didn't attend the next appointment. I never saw him again.” She shrugged. “I've no idea what he thinks happened to me.”

“I imagine he thinks you married Will McAvoy and are pregnant again. You and Will were just on the cover of People magazine, and every doctor in America has at least one copy in the waiting room,” Leona said. 

“Probably.” Mac replied, smiling a bit.

“And you feel guilty for not listening to your doctor and for ending up in a place like Afghanistan with minimal neonatal ICU facilities?”

“As I should,” Mac responded passionately. “I was irresponsible and absorbed in my own misery . . . .”

“You were heartbroken and clinically depressed,” Leona retorted.

“And I should have addressed that!” Mac snapped. Leona smiled despite herself. She loved debating the former President of the Cambridge Union. She could see that nothing was going allow Mac to take herself off the hook.

“Lee,” Mac began, and Leona relaxed visibly at this indication they were back on a first name basis. “I know what it is to be maternal, to put your child’s interests and well-being before your own. It's sort of second nature with Charlotte. I know what I didn't do for William, and there’s no excuse.”

Leona inclined her head in defeat. “Excuse? Maybe not,” the older woman replied, “but there seems to be to be an explanation that at least mitigates, or should mitigate the self-condemnation, Mac. And, please tell me, why do I get to be the villain when your psyche turns on the torture?”

“Because . . . because you were a better mother . . . than I. Because of Reese.” Leona’s eyes went wide. “You must have felt as bereft . . . when Charlie tricked you onto that helicopter . . . as lost, as alone.” Leona closed her eyes and almost seemed to sway slightly in her chair. “But you protected Reese. You didn't do risky things. You were responsible. He was born healthy.”

Leona rose, and walked over to stand in front of MacKenzie. Slowly, she reached down and cupped the younger woman’s chin in both of her hands, turning Mac’s face up and locking onto her eyes as only Leona Lansing could do.

“MacKenzie, listen to me. I was not a better mother, or more responsible.” She gave a self-deprecating little laugh and glanced over at her son before returning her gaze to Mac. “Believe me, it was the seventies, and I engaged in risky behaviors I'll bet you never imagined. I am not a better person. I wasn't more maternal or ethical or nurturing or . . . .” She drifted off for a moment, shaking her head, lost in memories. “The only thing that I was that you weren't, McMac, is damned fucking lucky.” 

Leona pulled Mac against her as a dam inside of MacKenzie broke. Mac wrapped her arms around Leona and sobbed. “It's okay,” Leona whispered in the soothing voice that Reese had heard come from his mother since childhood, “let it out. Let it go.” She began to slowly rock from side to side ever so slightly, repeating “Oh, baby,” and “My sweet girl,” like a mantra. 

When Mac’s sobs and gasps began to subside, Leona pulled an Irish linen handkerchief out of her pocket and started to wipe her face. “Tell me the rest,” she said while Mac finished the job and blew her nose. “No one at CNN knew you were pregnant when they sent you to Iraq?” Leona prompted, sitting down in her own chair once again.

“Afghanistan,” Mac corrected. “By way of the UK.” She told Leona about being unable to function in the studio, and not getting along with Will’s replacement, who was “completely unforgiving” of the mistakes she was making as his EP. Mac explained about Darius Walker trying to save her reputation at CNN by getting her out of D.C., insisting that she take some time off and giving her the gig in Afghanistan. She told how she had gone to Surrey because she had nowhere else to go, but left for Afghanistan early because she couldn't be honest with her parents about the situation with Will, and she didn't want them to find out about the baby yet. Leona interrupted the narrative only once to ask Mac how far along she was when she arrived in Kabul.

“I've always thought of it as twenty-two weeks, but I guess, it was actually twenty-four by the way the doctors count.”

“The baby was viable then,” Leona observed quietly. 

Mac nodded. “I'm pretty sure he was born alive. In my nightmares, he is . . . alive, I mean. I can't be completely positive, but I think that the dreams are frequently my brain recalling a memory I suppress when I'm awake. They feel like a memory. In the dreams, I wrap William in one of Will’s old t-shirts, and I know now that that’s true, so I think maybe the rest of it is too. If so, then I poured water on his forehead and he cried . . . .”

“Dear God.” Leona closed her eyes, but tears leaked out anyway.

“I baptized him William Duncan. I was losing consciousness at that point. I was bleeding. I don't know how long it was, I don't remember anything clearly . . . I don't know how long he lived . . . but eventually, he stopped breathing.” Mac’s voice dropped to a hushed and breathy whisper. “In the nightmares, I watch him die.”

Leona moaned softly, and then, for a long time, the room was silent. Then, she spoke again.

“I still don't understand! What was the doctor doing?” There was anguish and outrage in Leona’s voice, as she jumped up to pace. “I know it was Kabul, but still . . . what kind of a hospital were you in that . . . .”

“I wasn't in hospital.” Mac said in a flat emotionless tone. “I was in the Intercontinental Hotel . . . in my room . . . alone . . . when the baby . . . when William was born.”

While Leona was slowly processing this revelation, Will addressed his wife. “Kenz, darling, you said that you now know for a fact that you wrapped William in a t-shirt.” His eyes narrowed. “How?” “What did you mean?”

Reese took a sharp involuntary breath. Here it comes, he thought, and wondered who would be angrier, his friend or his mother.

Mac looked at Will, then at Reese, and then back at Will. She was visibly exhausted, and her husband wondered at what point this was going to be bad for Charlotte, but he also sensed that the catharsis was more beneficial in the long run than the immediate stress. Certainly, having things back on an even keel with Lee was good for everyone concerned. Mac seemed to be summoning some reserves of inner strength before answering. But he was the one unprepared for what came next. 

“I spoke to Nina this morning,” Mac said taking another deep breath. 

“Why?”

“I called her and asked her for the sources and information she had when she met with you . . . to . . . to . . . to discuss investing in her restaurant venture.” Nina hadn't run the story of William’s birth, and Mac had no desire to throw her under Leona’s bus. She was sure that Lee would go batshit if she ever learned that Nina had been running a blackmail operation out of one of AWM’s publications, even if it no longer belonged to her. “It's been nagging at me lately. What you remembered Nina saying seemed too close to things Dantana’s lawyers wrote. I needed to know what she had on me, and where it came from.” Mac shrugged as Will continued to stare at her, his face a mask devoid of expression. “I just needed to know what she knew. Level the playing field.”

“Level the playing field?” her husband repeated in disbelief.

“I don't know. Okay, Billy? I just needed to have the information. Another piece of the puzzle. She only had one thing.” Mac paused. “She emailed it to me.”

“What is it?” Will asked when he could trust his voice to sound somewhat normal.

“It's a statement from a man named Armstrong that was given to Jerry Dantana. Armstrong is in the hotel business. When he gave the statement a few years ago, he was working at the Willard Hotel in Washington. In 2007, he was the Assistant Manager at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan.” Mac swallowed hard before continuing. “He was one of the first people to arrive at my room.”

Will groaned. “How did Dantana . . . ?”

“Nina thinks that they met somehow in D.C. and that Armstrong had been a repeated source for Jerry.”

Will looked confused. “Jerry gave this . . . got this, and gave it to Nina Howard to do a take-down piece on you three years ago? Why? Why would he do that?”

Reese cleared his throat. “Jerry gave it to me. I gave it to Nina.”

Will whirled around. “You?”

“In Reese’s defense, he hadn't read it, and it was represented to him as something other than what it turned out to be. He didn't know it was about . . . what it’s about . . . until today.”

Will continued to stare at Reese. “You wanted Nina to do a story about Mac having been pregnant . . . about losing her . . . our . . . baby?” His voice was laced with barely suppressed rage. “What did you want from making this public? You thought you’d get back your ratings whore if you could drive her off a ledge?”

“Billy! Didn't you hear a word I just said?”

Will ignored her. “Where is it? Armstrong’s statement. Do you have it?” he asked Reese. “I want to read it.”

Reese picked it up from his desk and handed it to Will. Mac rose from her chair and touched her husband’s shoulder. 

“Sit down, Billy,” she said softly, lightly stroking his cheek. Wordlessly he complied, sank into the chair she’d vacated, and began to read.

Mac saw his jaw clenching as he read, the muscles in his neck tightening until she expected to hear his teeth cracking. She heard his breathing become rapid, and saw his hands begin to shake. Then the paper slipped between his fingers and fluttered to the floor, as he curled into himself, buried his face in his hands and wept. 

Leona picked it up. “May I?” she asked. 

“Of course,” Mac replied, bending over to comfort her husband, whose shoulders had begun to shake. “Billy . . . Billy . . . It's okay. I'm okay,” she crooned. “It's over . . . it happened in the past . . . .”

Will allowed her to raise his head and rest it against her body, and to encircle him with her arms. After a moment, his hands came up and rested on each side of her belly. “Kenz . . . I . . . I never . . . never meant . . . .” Suddenly, Will froze, then wailed in anguish, “but I did . . . I did . . . when I cut you off . . . I meant to hurt you . . . I wanted you to hurt . . . I wanted . . . .”

“I know . . . Shush . . . It's okay . . .really, Billy . . . .”

“No! No, it's not! I wanted you to suffer . . . and I caused . . . .” The rest of his words choked on his tears.

Just then Charlotte kicked out hard against his hand . . . once . . . twice . . . three times. Leona Lansing, who had been reading in horrified silence, looked up abruptly as Mac chuckled softly and said, “that’s right, Charlie, you go girl. Remind Daddy that you’re here. Remind him of the miracle that we have so he'll stop thinking about what we’ve lost.” 

Will turned his tear-streaked face up to look into his wife’s eyes. She bent down and softly brushed a kiss against his lips, then straightened up and smiled at him. “You don't deserve me, McAvoy, so don't even ask.” Then, they both turned, as Leona started speaking to Reese.

“Why did Dantana ask this man to write this?” she asked, gesturing with the paper in her hand. “Why did he give it to you?” Reese seemed unable to formulate an answer. He stood rooted to the floor beside his desk, and stared at Leona, looking, Mac thought, like any kid . . . every kid . . . being questioned by a disapproving parent.

“Reese was doing opposition research on me . . . when I first got here,” Mac volunteered for him. “We’ve talked about it all. It's okay” she added hastily. 

Mac’s coming to his defense seemed to reanimate Reese. He ran his hand through his hair and sighed deeply before responding to his mother. Then, he told her the truth. All of it, including the part about recruiting Nina Howard to write an article about MacKenzie’s emotional instability and alleged suicide attempt in Pakistan, as a prelude to removing her from the News Night staff. Reese said that he hadn't bothered to read what Dantana had given him and had forgotten all about it until Mac had stormed into his office and confronted him. He'd just passed it along to Nina telling her what Jerry had told him . . . that he had a source who could say that Mac had once tried to kill herself. 

Will winced at those words, recalling Armstrong's conclusion that Mac had delivered the child without summoning help because she had wanted it and herself to die. But, as he had throughout Reese’s comfession, Will remained silent, consumed by his own guilt. 

Leona too had said very little until it was clear that Reese had finished explaining. Then she asked, “Nina’s had a copy of this for two years and hasn't published anything? What's she up to?”

Again it was Mac who answered. “She just says she won't run a story about . . . the baby. I didn't ask her why not.” Mac paused. “I believe her. I don't think she'll do that to me. I think that even Nina has her limits.”

When Will spoke, his voice sounded hoarse and gravelly. “You gave this to Nina right after Mac started at News Night?” he asked Reese.

“Well, soon after . . . why?”

“I just can't figure out why she never told me or gave it to me,” Will responded. 

“I asked her that this morning,” Mac replied.

“You did? Did she answer you?”

“I'm the President of ACN, Billy, everyone answers me,” Mac teased, trying to lighten his dark mood, and identical smiles came to Reese’s and Leona’s faces. MacKenzie was amazing, and she'd been right, Will certainly had done nothing to deserve her. “Actually,” Mac continued, “Nina said something about not giving it to you because it would have sent you running to me.” 

“She knew . . . it . . . he . . . the baby was mine?”

“Not at first. She assumed that it was Brian’s . . . the product of my cheating on you of email fame.” Mac smiled ruefully at the memory of inadvertently informing everyone with an AWM email address of her infidelity. “But then when Brian interviewed her for his article, Nina interviewed him for hers, and learned that he'd had no contact with me for almost two years before I went to Kabul.” 

“It would have, you know? She was right.”

Mac cocked her head slightly to the side.

“It would have sent me to you.” He touched the side of her face. 

The buzzer on Reese’s intercom sounded, jolting them all. “Yes?” Reese answered.

“Jim Harper is here looking for Mr. McAvoy. Mr. Harper says he's missing the morning rundown.”

“Jim! Oh God! I've got to tell Jim, but I just can't do it right now.” Mac had gone white as a sheet, and Will and Reese were just staring at her, so Leona took charge.

“Tell her to tell him that Will will be right out,” she said to Reese. “Pull yourself together, McAvoy, it's showtime. Go out there and get on with it.” Then turning back to her son, she said, “You go back to work. And you,” she finished, finally looking at Mac and then grabbing her hand, “you’re coming with me.”


	15. Getting Closer

“Why on Earth . . . what the fuck did I say that for?” Will McAvoy asked in a voice laced with frustration and anger.

Because it's true, Jack Habib thought, taking another bite of his sandwich, and saying nothing. He'd responded to Will’s hurried request for an emergency session by offering to see him during the lunch hour if Will agreed to bring food. What had arrived in addition to the somewhat distraught newscaster, were a couple of healthy, nice-looking turkey sandwiches on whole-grain bread accompanied by drinks of the low-sugar variety. MacKenzie’s influence no doubt, Habib mused. Will’s food was largely untouched since he'd spent all of his time describing the events in Reese’s office that morning, focusing most on his response to Leona’s question about whether he had intended to conceive a child with MacKenzie in 2006. 

The standard psychiatric default response would have been something along the lines of “I don't know, Will. Why do you think you replied to the question in that manner?” However, Habib was becoming less and less of a default sort of therapist where the McAvoy’s were concerned. 

“Eat,” Habib said at length. “I'll talk for a moment. So, if I understand correctly, Leona Lansing asked you if you'd been trying to get Mac pregnant in 2006 and you said, yes. Eat, Will! Or I stop talking.” Habib smiled as Will obediently took a bite of his sandwich. Finding that he actually was hungry, Will continued to eat as the doctor began speaking again. “You say that you spoke without thinking, and now you have no recollection of what you thought back then about Mac getting pregnant.” The phrase, in a pig’s eye, jumped into the doctor’s mind, and this time, he let the silence hang.

“I knew she wasn't taking the pill,” Will said after a moment spent chewing and swallowing. Habib nodded. “And I knew that we weren't . . . being very good about condoms . . . or rhythm . . . or whatever.” Will’s voice trailed off and he stared at nothing for a few seconds. Then, a slight smile came to his lips. “Mac bought some foam or something at the drugstore in Lincoln . . . when we were in Nebraska . . . I just remembered that . . . but we didn't . . . she had to stop and . . . you know . . . use it . . . and we didn't . . . ..”

So MacKenzie was also trying, or at least willing to get pregnant, Habib mused. “And you were talking about marriage?”

“Yes . . . no . . . God, it's all so hazy. I don't think I'd said the words, ‘will you marry me.’ I'm pretty sure I hadn't risked that,” Will added, completely oblivious, Habib thought, to the import of what he'd just said. “But we'd both said things about never wanting to be apart and not being able to imagine the future without the other one . . . you know, stuff like that.” Will paused. “She said that she wanted to have kids . . . you know . . . with me.” Habib said nothing. Just gave his head a little nod. “Frankly, I’ve tried not to think about these things for so long . . . it's hard . . . .” Will trailed off with an apologetic shrug.

“That reminds me of something that struck me the last time I read my father’s notes in your file,” Habib said, pausing either for emphasis or to formulate his next thought, Will wasn't sure. “You never once talked to him about the days, weeks . . . months, really . . . immediately preceding Mac’s disclosure that she'd cheated on you with Brian.” Indeed, Abe had noted that Will exhibited an extreme, almost violent, resistance to talking about the period preceding his break-up with MacKenzie.

“It wasn't exactly cheating on me,” Will interrupted, earning him a raised eyebrow from Habib. “I mean,” Will took a deep breath, “I understand . . . now . . . that she needed to close it out . . . it was three years of her life.”

“If Mac were here,” Habib replied, smiling fondly, “she'd say that her transgression was not seeing Brenner again, it was lying to you by omission.” When Will said nothing, Habib continued. “I'd like to take a small diversion here. Okay?” Will nodded, a little baffled as to where this was going. 

“That's really something, when you think about it,” Habib continued. “I mean, lying doesn't come easily to her. When was the last time you heard MacKenzie deliberately try to mislead someone?” Before Will could answer, Habib grinned and amended the question, “other than when she tells you she's fine and she's not.”

Will smiled back. “I don't know. Never, I guess.” Then, he paused, “Wade . . . Wade Campbell . . . a guy she started dating around the end of 2010 . . . during the time I was chasing every skirt in Manhattan to prove I was over her.” Will’s mouth twisted into a rueful half-smile. “She says she misled Wade . . . but that was complicated, and, I think, given that way I was behaving during her first year at ACN, if she could have fallen in love with him, she would have. I guess she'd say that her sin was not breaking it off when she realized that trying to fall in love with him was futile.”

“Okay, Wade. But it seems that we’ve established that Mac doesn't misrepresent things easily or comfortably. Yet she mislead you. What does that say to you?”

Will just looked at him, and rather than do the “therapist thing” and let the silence go on until Will broke it, Habib began again to speak. “You agree it would have been much more like Mac to have come to you and said, ‘Billy, you’re a swell guy and I really, really like you, but I was with Brian for three years and now he wants us to try again, and I just can't say no and tell him to go away.’ But instead, she does something totally out of character and hides Brian’s offer to reconcile from you. Why?”

Will looked down at his sandwich with a slightly puzzled expression as if surprised to find it still in his hands. Then, he took another bite in silence.

“Why do people usually conceal things from other people?” Habib asked.

“Fear,” Will said at last.

“Exactly! Fear. And what was MacKenzie afraid of?”

“I don't know,” Will said.

Yes, you do know, Habib thought.

“Me,” Will said at length. “That I'd get angry.” He stopped.

“And?” 

“Reject her.”

“Bingo.”

“During the four months between Brian’s appearing at her door with flowers, champagne and an engagement ring . . . .” Will’s dumbfounded expression stopped the doctor in mid-sentence. “You didn't know that? About the ring?” Will shook his head. Habib sighed. “I try to not let that happen. Well, I guess that's why you guys signed all those waivers. Anyway, during the time that MacKenzie was figuring things out with Brian, do you know how many times she slept with him?”

This time he waited until Will finally said, “four . . . five, maybe.”

“Okay, let's call it five times. So, there are approximately one hundred and twenty days and nights in four months, a little more, but I do best with round numbers, and MacKenzie spent . . . five . . . with Brian. That leaves a hundred and fifteen nights when she chose not to be with the man she'd convinced herself that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with and who apparently had concluded that he wanted the same. Got any idea where she was all that time . . . all those hundred and fifteen nights?”

Will finished chewing the bite of sandwich that was in his mouth and took a long pull on his drink. “With me,” he said, looking straight at Habib, “most of them, anyway . . . she was with me.”

Habib nodded, looking, Will thought, rather like a teacher with a pupil who’s starting to catch on. Then, to Will’s utter shock and amazement, Habib shook his head sagely and said, “Poor Brian. The guy never had a chance . . . .”

“Poor Brian?” Will interrupted, confused and outraged. “Did you just say, poor Brian?”

Jack held up his hands, palms toward Will. “Don't get me wrong, I really have no sympathy for Brenner. I’ve never met the man, but he sounds like a total schmuck.” Will looked somewhat mollified by that statement, so Habib decided to yank his chain a bit. “I must add, however,” the doctor continued, “that I don't say that because of the New York Magazine article. You pretty much issued him an engraved invitation for that one, Billy.” Since Mac had become his patient, Dr. Habib had taken to calling Will, “Billy,” to make a point. “I say it because he was emotionally, psychologically and on occasion, physically abusive to Mac.”

Will took a breath and tried to end, or at least, redirect the conversation. “Look, I think I have the point of this,” he said. Habib simply raised an eyebrow. “I over-reacted about Brian,” Will continued, scrubbing his hands over his face. “Insanely. Totally. Christ! I’m well aware of that.” Will flashed on what he had read that morning in Reese’s office. “I can't tell you how fucking aware of that I am.”

“Yes. I'm sure you are,” Habib rejoined, genuine compassion in his voice. “And that’s not quite my point. My point,” Habib said, “is that by the time she tried to talk to you about Brian, you must have known that Mac was yours . . . completely . . . that you owned her . . . .” They exchanged a look that acknowledged the reference to Will’s marriage proposal. “During the two years you were together, you had to believe that MacKenzie loved you . . . I mean, no one looking at you two together could miss it . . . and yet . . .” Habib paused, considering his words. “. . . that awareness wasn't able to sustain you so that you could hear what she was saying about Brian . . . saying about what she did and felt and thought when Brian had come back into her life eighteen months before.” The doctor paused again, now looking as if he were concerned that he'd gone too far, but then, deciding to plow ahead. “I think that the why of this is something that you’ve ignored up until now. For one thing, it requires you to remember those days . . . and that morning. But, I think, given everything that’s happening, that it might well be worth exploring.”

 

 

“Safety, I guess. I felt so safe with Billy.” MacKenzie bit her lower lip and looked at Leona Lansing, who had finished explaining how Reese had come about, and asked her why she hadn't been more careful about birth control when she'd conceived William. They were seated in Leona’s office, each holding a steaming mug of green and white tea, which, Leona noted with satisfaction, was having the intended effect of relaxing MacKenzie. Lee could see it in her face, in her posture, and hear it in her breathing.

“I never felt completely safe with Brian.” The younger woman shook her head as if to clear an unpleasant thought. “I convinced myself that I wanted to marry him, but I never thought about wanting babies with him. What an idiot, I was. With Billy . . . .” A soft smile played around Mac’s lips at the name. “. . . everything was different. I was being reckless, but . . . well, so what if there was a baby? I was getting on to thirty. God knows Will was old enough to start a family,” Mac continued with a shrug. “Suddenly, with him, having a child seemed . . . reasonable.”

Leona laughed at the choice of the last word, and thought about the import of what Mac had said. Safety . . . protection, she mused, that quality in a male for which the breeding female searches by primal instinct. Cambridge educated or not, MacKenzie had been acting on a million years of evolution selecting “Billy” (Leona smiled at the nickname) to be the father of her child. Will McAvoy would protect her and the child, and so he won the biological lottery. Well, that and the fact that Mac was obviously crazy about him, and they were probably fucking like rabbits. Lee’s heart clenched as her mind’s eye filled with the impossibly young face of the ex-Marine turned journalist, who had come to her rescue on a sweltering summer night in a Saigon bar and escorted her from a potential rape to safety. “We need a signal,” he’d said later, “for when you feel vulnerable.” RNL in Morse Code. Right Now Lover. Reese Nelson Lansing.

“It's funny,” MacKenzie continued when Leona made eye contact with her again, “I've always felt safe with Will . . . even when he was going out of his way to hurt me . . . even when he was threatening to fire me at the end of each week.”

“That! Oh, God! You should have seen Charlie’s face when Scott’s voice came through the speaker . . . .” Leona gestured toward her desk. “. . . saying Will had agreed to give me back a million dollars a year on the remaining three of his contract and sign a death clause in return for the ability to hire and fire his EP. The demands had been Charlie’s idea . . . .”

“Keeping Will off the air for years if he were to leave or be terminated from ACN was Charlie’s idea!” Mac interjected. “I always thought that you put that in because you wanted to be able to threaten him with ruin if he didn't do the kind of reporting that you wanted,” 

“No,” Leona laughed, reaching over and taking MacKenzie’s chin in her hand. Mac had the fleeting thought that far from being the unapproachable goddess she had seemed to be, Leona Lansing was actually quite tactile. “I was never the enemy, MacKenzie,” she said solemnly. “Oh, I had to keep Charlie from bankrupting this place with his highfalutin ideals about journalism,” she laughed, releasing Mac’s chin. “I don't deny that. But this business with Will’s contract that first day you arrived had nothing to do with that. We both thought my demands were outrageous, but Charlie said I had to make it something that Will would never go for.” Leona chuckled. “You could tell from Scott’s voice that he thought that Will was as insane as we did.” She rolled her eyes at Mac, and made a mental note to deposit the $3 million she'd taken from Will in a trust for Charlotte. 

She could almost see Charlie Skinner in the spot on the sofa that Mac was currently occupying, his jaw slack with shock as she'd disconnected the call with Will’s agent.

“Now what do you plan to do, Dr. Mastermind?” she'd asked him. “Will’s going to fire her the first chance he gets, dashing your matchmaking plans and leaving our flagship show without an EP.”

Charlie had shaken his head. “I knew that he was terrified of seeing her again, but . . . this?”

“And what are you going to do about little Miss What’s-her-name? You think she’s in love with him? What is her name, anyway?”

“I know she is . . . in love with him, that is. MacKenzie McHale.”

“McHale . . . McHale . . . why does that sound familiar?”

“Probably because of Ambassador McHale . . . Sir Edward . . . . For years he was the British Ambassador to the U.N., and since then, he's been the Queen’s Special Envoy for God knows how many delicate diplomatic missions.”

“Oh, right. He's a Barron or something . . . no, an Earl. Well connected. I was seated with him and his wife at some function a few years ago. White tie. He had on so many medals and sashes, I'm surprised he could stand. But it was dashing in a very British sort of way. His wife’s a knockout. Great sense of humor too, very droll, and highly intelligent.”

“The daughter’s a knockout too . . . and talk about brilliant. Her coverage of the war in Iraq was impeccable. She was President of the Cambridge Union. You know, like John Maynard Keynes. You should take the ti . . . .”

“Hold on a fucking minute! This girl, whose life you’re screwing around with, is Ambassador McHale’s daughter! A man who can put us in a world of hurt with a few well-placed phone calls! You ever think he might get pissed off when Will fires his little girl a week after she’s started here, after you searched her out, disrupted her life, and sweet-talked her into moving to New York and coming to ACN?” She didn't give him a chance to answer. “Not to mention, that if you're right about her emotions for McAvoy, he's going to break her heart. Jesus, Charlie! Do you have some deep seeded desire to ruin this company that you just can't control?”

Charlie’d known that the last question wasn't meant to be answered. “Ted McHale’s not like that,” he’d said.

“Oh, Ted is it. You’re best buds, I suppose,” Leona said sarcastically, and grimaced at his naïveté. 

Charlie ignore her. “Besides, Will’s not going to fire MacKenzie. As soon as he sees her again, some part of his brain . . . even if it's subconscious . . . is going to realize that she's all he's been waiting for . . . that the last thing he really wants . . . the only thing he can't live with . . . is the sight of her walking away from him forever.”

“And, just what makes you so sure of that?” she'd demanded.

Charlie Skinner had held her gaze for a long time before he'd whispered, “experience.”

MacKenzie watched Leona, wondering where her thoughts were taking her. In the silence, Mac’s turned back to Armstrong’s description of the scene he'd encountered in her hotel room in Kabul. When Leona came back to her, Mac asked, “may I have it back? Armstrong’s statement.” When the question produced no immediate answer, Mac added, “I thought I saw it in your hand when we left. Did you bring it up here or leave it in Reese’s office?”

“No. I've got it, but let me ask you something first,” Leona said in an attempt to divert Mac from going back to the subject of her baby’s death, “when did you and Reese become so friendly?”

“Oh . . . well . . . .” Mac seemed startled by the question. “I suppose it was when he came to see me one Saturday morning while Will was in prison.” A tiny smile played at MacKenzie’s lips at the memory. “It was about 2 weeks after I'd taken the home pregnancy tests. No one knew. I didn't even quite believe it myself. But the fact that my breasts were aching like a tooth, and I lost my breakfast every morning and about half of my evening meals as well was beginning to make it all sink in.” She grinned at Leona. “Anyway, I was spending so much time in the bathroom, or to be precise, on the bathroom floor, that I eventually made myself a little nest there with blankets, bottled water, some crackers and Will’s iPod with a portable speaker.

“So, this particular Saturday, it was raining buckets and I was spending a pleasant morning retching to Fleetwood Mac . . . .“ 

Leona began to chuckle. “You’re a crack-up, sometimes, McMac.”

“. . . when the house phone rang and the doorman announced that I had a visitor, an extremely wet visitor, I might add.” Leona nodded in a way that told Mac that she recalled the day very well. “I let Reese in, got him some of Will’s clothes to change into . . . .”

“That must have been a sight,” Lee interrupted.

“Yes, and since I was also wearing Will’s sweatpants and t-shirt, we made quite the pair. I made us some tea, but I'd barely begun to drink when I had to run back to the bathroom. Reese sat in the kitchen for a long time waiting for me to return before coming to look for me. When he found me, he sat down on the floor beside me and . . . . Well,” Mac shrugged, “there was something about sitting on a blanket together in my half-finished bathroom, both of us dressed in my husband's clothes, that broke down barriers . . . or maybe bridged gaps would be more accurate. He started singing to the music and then we talked for a very long time and . . . .”

“He told you about Charlie?”

“No. Not directly at least. But I told him about Charlotte . . . of course, I didn't know it was Charlotte then, just that I was pregnant. He told me that the stock that was letting the evil twins destroy us had been paid as hush money to protect him, but that's all.” MacKenzie paused, “well, almost all. He also asked me if I'd ever wondered why Arthur Lansing had designated only Blair and Randy as beneficiaries of his estate.

“I think he wanted to tell me . . . I know he’s proud of being Charlie's son . . . your and Charlie’s son . . . I think he just wasn't sure if he should tell anyone.”

“But what he said got you to wondering why Arthur left Reese out of his will?”

“Yes,” Mac nodded. “It did.”

“And did you figure it out?” Leona asked, and then answered her own question, “of course, you figured it out. Cambridge would expect nothing less.” For a split second Mac thought Leona was referring to the Duke, but then realized that it was the university.

“Actually, it was more emotion than logic,” MacKenzie replied. “I had a dream . . . about eyes . . . and when I woke, I thought about Reese’s eyes and how I'd sometimes look at him, and . . . see Charlie’s,” Mac smiled at Leona, “or how I imagine Charlie’s eyes must have looked when he was young. I've never seen a picture of him . . . .”

“Would you like to?” Leona interjected impulsively, standing and walking to her desk even before Mac could answer. She returned to the sofa holding a small silver frame containing a black-and-white print. Mac was struck by how young Lee suddenly seemed, holding the frame gently, somewhat hesitantly, in her hands. As Leona handed Mac the photograph, Mac got the distinct impression that she was the first person in a long time, or maybe the first person ever, with whom Leona Lansing had shared this memory of Charlie. 

“Oh, my God!” Mac exclaimed softly, and grinned at Lee. Charlie Skinner, young and lean, with thick black hair falling over his ears, stood grinning back at her. He was dressed in military issue shorts like those Mac herself had worn in Iraq, and his shirtless body sported full “six-pack” abs. His skin seemed to glisten with sweat and vitality. In one hand, he held a bottle . . . beer, Mac presumed . . . by the neck, and his other arm was wrapped around the waist of an equally fit and attractive young woman. Her long blonde hair was held back by a Rambo style scarf tied around her forehead. She was also wearing military shorts and a halter top that looked to have been made from an Indian fabric. She was obviously not wearing a bra and her firm breasts and nipples were straining the cloth. She was looking up at Charlie with an expression that said she would follow him to the ends of the Earth. 

“Can't believe Charlie and I were ever that young, McMac?”

“No! Not at all. It's just . . . . He was gorgeous.”

Lee smiled. “Saigon,” she said. “I can't seem to think of it as Ho Chi Minh City. I can call it that now, but when I think of it . . . in my life, it's always Saigon.” She touched a finger to the image of Charlie’s cheek. “This was taken by a friend of ours, an AP photographer, a few days before we evacuated.” Leona laughed, and a touch of sadness lingered in the air. “There were no pregnancy tests available in drugstores back then . . . certainly, not in drugstores in Saigon . . . actually, I don't think there were any drugstores left in Saigon by the end . . . but I suspected . . . knew . . . I was pregnant when this was taken.” MacKenzie simply reached for Lee’s hand and they sat in silence for a very long time.


	16. Aftermath

In the weeks following Mac’s obtaining the copy of Alex Armstrong’s statement from Nina Howard, Jack Habib saw a great deal of the McAvoy’s. Will and MacKenzie each had three private sessions a week as well as two that they attended together. In his individual sessions, Habib pushed Will hard to remember the weeks and months leading up the morning he'd stepped over Mac’s sobbing form and ordered her to vacate his life and apartment forever. It was slow going since the blockages that Will had put up around these memories had walled them off from his conscious mind almost as if the events had never happened.

Habib had tried starting in reverse order with their days in Washington right before Mac tried to tell him that she was pregnant, but Will’s inability or, as Habib thought of it, his refusal to remember proved intractable. Suspecting what revelation was lurking there, the doctor had jumped to the other end of the continuum and asked Will about the trip to Nebraska for Thanksgiving, and then their travel to Surrey for Christmas and New Year’s Day. Once Will got started on these subjects, the memories, many of them disjointed and unconnected, came flooding back. Habib filled pages and pages of notes in almost two weeks of sessions.

In contrast, MacKenzie remembered those days with a chronological, almost eidetic, recall. 

“My God! Will’s father hated me,” MacKenzie had blurted out, and then, shuddered visibly at the memory. She had been describing for Habib the conversations with Will that had led up to his making the decision to take her to Nebraska to tour the “sights of his youth” and meet his family over the Thanksgiving holiday.

“Really?” Habib rejoined kiddingly. “I wonder why.”

“I know it's hard to believe since everyone else finds me thoroughly enchanting, but, trust me, John McAvoy seemed to loathe me from the moment he laid eyes on me.

“You threatened him.”

“I suppose . . . .”

“You knew nothing of the abuse when you went to Nebraska?”

“Not when we arrived. Not the first time I met Will’s father. But after . . . . You see, I tried everything that first day to be agreeable and respectful.” MacKenzie laughed. “I remember being in the loo at Will’s sister’s house when his dad was there and trying to think about everything my Gran and Mum and Nanny had told me about how to behave. I wanted him to like me so much that I acted as if I were having tea with the flippin’ Queen.” She smiled the self-deprecating smile that made her so appealing. “Nothing worked. In fact, the more I tried, the more rude and dislikable Will’s father became. There was nothing I could do to win his favor.”

“No,” Habib said quietly, “I imagine there wasn't.”

Mac smiled and gave her head a little shake. “Anyway,” she sighed at the memory, “I got very upset about it with Billy that night in bed at Rosemary’s. I don't mean I was upset at anything Will had done. I meant I was with Will when I got upset at the whole situation . . . I had no idea what his father’s displeasure would mean for our relationship. It scared me.”

“How did Will react?”

“He said . . . well, what seemed at the time like the most amazing thing . . . he took me in his arms and stroked my hair the way he does, and we sat in silence for a very long time, and then, he said, ‘of course, my father hates you, Kenz; you love me.’ I was speechless . . . .”

Actually, it was Dr. Habib who was speechless. “Repeat what Will said,” the doctor finally whispered, his pen poised over his notepad.

“He said, ‘of course, my father hates you; you love me,” she repeated slowly, as they looked at each other, bringing to those words all that they knew, all that had happened in the almost seven years since they had been spoken. 

When Habib did not speak again, Mac continued, “I . . . I wouldn't let it go . . . . I asked him . . . forced him . . . to explain what he meant. It took a very long time. We were up most of the night talking. But finally, I wore him down, and he told me all of it . . . the beatings, the broken bones, lying to hospital staff about how he or his mother got hurt, his father slapping and punching his mother, his brother, his sisters, the broken bottle, jail, the abuse turning more verbal and psychological after Will got big enough to fight back . . . .” Mac signed again. “All of it,” she finished softly.

“What did you do?” Habib asked.

“That night? Or, should I say, that morning?” 

The doctor nodded.

MacKenzie too a deep breath. “Let's see,” she began by holding up three fingers and ticking off each action as she spoke. “I cried. I made love to Billy until his ears bled.” She slitted her eyes playfully at Habib, who grinned in spite of all efforts to keep a therapeutic pose. “And, I stopped giving a flying fuck what John McAvoy thought of me.”

“And,” Habib mused softly, almost to himself, “voila! Will had . . . that which had been lacking in his childhood . . . the champion . . . the woman . . . who loved him enough that she was willing to fight his father to protect him.” Habib paused, lost in thought. “Small wonder,” he continued, “that the mere suggestion that such an expectation was unfounded, that your love had not been true . . . that Will had been betrayed again . . . was enough to send him into a quasi-psychotic state into which the words you were actually speaking about Brian had been unable to penetrate.”

“What are you saying?” Mac asked, biting her lower lip. “That it wasn't my betrayal . . . or, at least not my betrayal alone . . . that Will was reacting to?”

“No.” Habib looked at her with that half-sad, half-ironic smile of his. “Or . . . I mean, yes. More importantly, that's why he couldn't forgive you.”

“I don't understand. His father?”

“I'm not sure I understand all of it either . . . . No. This has to do with Will’s relationship with women.”

Mac’s brows knitted together. “He couldn't forgive me . . . because he can't . . . or hasn't . . . forgiven the other betrayal . . .” Mac said haltingly, trying to follow Habib’s lead. “Who else then? Besides his father, who else ever betrayed him?”

“You tell me, Mac.”

Her arms instinctively wrapped around her swollen belly, and her chin fell against her body, as she seemed to both deflate and curl around her unborn child. “His mother.” She spoke the words in a barely audible tone. Then she breathed in and raised her head to look at the doctor. “His mother,” she repeated. “Every day. Every day that she let that man touch him, strike him and hurt him.” And then the tears came, and she said nothing more.

Habib decided to explore John McAvoy’s relationship to MacKenzie when they came for their next joint session in the hope that he could lead Will to the conversation at his sister’s house the night after Mac met his father. However, as Abe had always told him, psychiatry, like life, is full of surprises.

“He kept telling me . . .” Will was saying, “ every fucking chance he got alone with me . . . how Mac was going to . . . dump me . . . how stupid I was to care for someone like her . . . how he couldn't wait to see me get my ‘comeuppance’ by having my heart broken . . . .”

“At the same time, you said, he lusted after her . . . talked to you about her breasts and her legs?” Habib reinforced. Will nodded. 

Sitting beside her husband, with their hands tightly clasped together, Mac felt slightly sick at the thought of John McAvoy discussing her anatomy, and sicker yet at the knowledge that he had undermined his son’s self-confidence and fed his own child’s insecurities. Love was a scary enough proposition without enemy action. She thought of her mother telling her recently that her own family, especially her brother, Julian, had been taken aback that Christmas by her obvious need for and dependence on Will. 

“So, MacKenzie both frightened and attracted him . . .” Habib began again, but Will wasn't listening. He was lost in his own thoughts with a look that mixed horror, revulsion and revelation. Mac was staring at her husband, perplexed and concerned. Finally, he spoke.

“I was so afraid . . . “ Will began in a hushed tone that was almost a whisper. “I wanted to . . . to control . . . you . . . or the situation.” When she said nothing, he took a shaky breath and continued, “I did . . . I did try . . . . Mac, I’m sorry . . . I thought that a baby . . . having a baby . . . would tie you . . . to me . . . that you’d be less likely to leave . . . me.”

MacKenzie looked incredulous and perplexed, an expression that deepened as she spoke. “Leave you . . . . Why? You thought I would . . . leave you? That I was capable of leaving you?”

Will wasn't listening to her, that much was apparent. He seemed to have gone inside himself, travelled a long way or a long time from New York in 2013. Habib, sitting across from them, leaned forward in his chair. Mac stopped talking and just watched her husband. Finally, Habib spoke.

“Will, what are you thinking about?” he asked gently. There was no answer, but just as the doctor was readying himself to repeat the question, Will shook his head.

“What?” Habib asked instead.

“I . . . nothing. I . . . just . . . thought about something . . . from when I was a kid. That’s all. It's not important.”

“No!” Mac said sharply before Habib got the chance to speak. “Nothing’s ‘not important’ . . . not in here . . . Please . . . .” She looked imploringly at her husband. “Please, Billy,” she repeated softly, “talk about it.”

Will paused, staring at her for a moment, and then, turned away, removed his hand from hers and clenched both of his hands together in his lap. At the same time, he hunched his shoulders, as if he were growing smaller and younger. Finally, glancing again at MacKenzie, who gave her head a slight but encouraging nod, he began.

“I flashed on myself lying in bed . . . listening to them. I couldn't hear much through the walls, but I knew they . . . my parents . . . were fighting . . . again . . . .”

“How old were you?” Habib interrupted. 

“Seven . . . Eight. It was a couple of years before the bottle incident.” Habib nodded and Will continued. “There was a crash and the walls shook. He threw her up against the wall . . . that wasn't uncommon . . . and I heard him shouting about her turning away . . . . ‘Don't you fucking turn away from me.’” Will’s voice, lower now, snarled in a way that sickened MacKenzie. “She . . . She . . . I don't know . . . he shouted about her leaving him . . . I think . . . and that she didn't . . . didn't want another . . . .” Will’s voice broke as both Habib and his wife leaned forward toward him with identical expressions of concern on their faces. “Oh, God!” Will sobbed, “oh, God . . . he wanted to control her . . . just like I did . . . with you . . . .” He turned and looked at Mac, too overcome with emotion to continue. 

“What? What are you talking about?” she asked.

“He . . . he made her pregnant . . . with Jimmy . . . later . . . in the kitchen . . . I got up . . . .” Now Will looked at Habib. “It got quiet . . . I . . . was afraid . . . so I got up and went to . . . find her. They . . . . She was crying.” Now Will was crying as well. Mac reached for his hand, but he pulled it violently away. Habib saw her eyes grow wide with hurt and panic. “He'd . . . my father . . . .” Will said the words emphatically as if there was a need to tie himself to the man. “My father had pushed . . . her . . . over . . . against . . . on the table. Her shirt was up . . . her bra was undone . . . .” MacKenzie drew an involuntary breath, her hand flew up to cover her mouth, and the enormity and horror of what Will was describing fully registered with her. The sound of her gasp made Will turn toward her, but he looked at her as if she were a stranger whom he was slightly surprised to find in the room.

Habib willed her to stay calm, and tried to keep his own breathing slow and normal, and his face expressionless. “Go on,” he said quietly.

“He'd taken off . . . . The rest of her clothes were in a pile on the floor. She was begging . . . begging him to stop. But he was pushing himself into her . . . from behind . . . again and again . . . like he hated . . . wanted to hurt . . . .” Will trailed off and scrubbed his hand over his face as though with enough pressure, he could erase the images from his mind.

“They didn't see you?”

Will didn't seem to hear the question. Instead, he turned to MacKenzie. “Have I . . . have I ever . . . done . . . to you . . . .”

Habib saw her face go slack with shock, and the terror in her eyes increase as she realized that he was honestly disconnected from reality enough to pose that question. Then she wrapped her arms around him and clutched him to her as a mother would embrace a child. After a moment of holding him close, she extended her arms and backed away sufficiently to look into his face.

“My God, Billy! Think. Have you ever in your life entered me when I wasn't two steps away from being insane with desire?” She pulled him to her again, and Habib saw Will close his eyes as he clung to her. “Billy, listen to me. You are not your father. You never will become your father.” She took a breath to steady herself, before continuing to speak. “He was a sad, angry, jealous man. He was given this brilliant, beautiful little boy, but he took no joy in his son. Instead, he competed with you, and resented your mother’s affection for you.” She began to stroke her fingers through Will’s hair as she spoke. “He wanted to make you into his image, to make you just as fearful and hostile as he was, but you escaped. There were people all around you who helped you escape . . . your mother, who loved you, your sisters and brother, who looked up to you, teachers and coaches, who delighted in your mind and abilities, and finally Charlie, who respected and adored you . . . .”

“And you,” Will whispered, sounding more like himself.

“And me.” She leaned down and kissed him on the lips. “I wish you’d had the chance to confront your father before he died. Not in anger, or for revenge, but just to really see how completely different from him you are.” 

“I started to . . . in the detention center.” Will sat up straighter, and seemed to be more himself. “In my mind, of course,” he chuckled softly. “Two months in solitary and I was ready to talk to anyone.” Mac gave him a rueful smile and pushed a lock of his hair off of his forehead. “But back then, I didn't . . . hadn't . . . remembered that I'd seen him . . . rape . . . my mother . . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head.

“You have never hurt me, Billy. Not that way,” she amended, when he looked at her in disbelief. “You’ve never used sex to hurt me . . . not physically and not emotionally.” She paused, as if to make sure that she got the words right. “You say that you were afraid that I'd leave you when we conceived . . . William. If I thought that that would have meant that you wouldn't have been a good, loving father . . . if we’d have stayed together, you know . . . it might be concerning.” He turned his head away from her, and Habib could see fresh tears in his eyes. “Look at me, Billy.” Mac waited for him to make eye contact again. “You didn't force me to do anything that I didn't want to do, or wasn't prepared to do. I wanted to have your baby. I wanted to be your wife . . . as much six years ago as I do now. You own me, Will. You always have. It's just a physical law of the universe.”


	17. October Day

It would be one of those days when Will and MacKenzie McHale McAvoy would both thank God that Billy had taken control on Election Night and asked her to marry him. It would be one of those days when they would both miss Charlie Skinner with a terrible, visceral ache. It would be one of those days when Will McAvoy would remind America once again why he was the most highly-rated and trusted newscaster since Walter Cronkite. It would be one of those days when Neal Sampat would do his best to conceal from the President of ACN the number of angry Internet postings and tweeted death threats being made against her star anchor and the father of her child. 

However, as they emerged from the brownstone in which Jack Habib had his office and blinked into the late-October mid-morning light, neither Will nor MacKenzie had any idea what the rest of the day would bring. Mac knew only that her first order of business was to take care of Will. He stood on the curb like a shell-shocked soldier trying to figure out where he was and what he should be doing. He was as pale as a man who had seen a ghost, which, Mac mused, was pretty much what had happened . . . two ghosts, in fact . . . his father and his mother . . . Or, more to the point, his father raping his mother.

Angels and ministers of grace have mercy on us, Mac thought yet again, looking at her husband’s stricken expression and glassy eyes. She knew what it was like to be caught at the throat by the ghosts of the past . . . caught so firmly that the present reality of life receded into a distance that seemed beyond her ability to transverse. Will needed time, she realized, before he should be subjected to the stresses and demands of the News Night bull pen, and to be honest, she was not sure how well she would do returning to her own office so soon after the revelations of their session with Habib. They both needed time . . . time alone.

“Take me home, Billy,” she said quietly, threading her arm through his.

"What?" he asked. “I'm sorry. What did you say?” Will gazed at MacKenzie with a vague, frightened blankness like a man awakened from a deep sleep by a sudden noise. 

She had wanted to get his attention, and to distract him, but she certainly hadn't intended to stumble against him or to moan. In fact, she did both as she felt Charlotte shift and then kick against what had to be one of the last (please, God, let it be so) remaining adhesions in her abdomen. The baby’s movements produced a sharp pulling sensation that was instantly followed by a gut churning pain like a knife being plunged into her side. Strange, she reflected, as agony sliced through her, she actually had no recollection of the sensation of the physical knife entering her body . . . the one that had produced the wound, the scars of which, her unborn daughter was now pushing out of the way.

“Mac! My God! Kenz, what's happening?” Instinctively, Will clutched her to him, and she saw concern and protectiveness, tinged with panic, bringing him rapidly out of his past and into the present. Through her pain, she was struck by an indescribable sorrow and anger at the thought that this too was part of the destructive pattern of his childhood. She could see in his face the little boy pushing down the hurt of his own bruises, cuts and broken bones to assume the role of protector . . . then, for his mother, sisters and brother, and now, for her.

“Adhesion . . .” she gasped out. “Charlie’s . . . getting one . . . she . . . missed . . . I'm fine . . . or I will be . . . .” At that moment, their taxi glided to a stop, double parking, and with Mac leaning on Will, they made their way between the cars and into the back seat. “Home,” Mac repeated. “I need . . . to go home.”

Will brushed his lips against her forehead and gave their address to the driver. 

 

Stretched out on the large sea of dark blue percale that was the bed Mac shared with her husband, she breathed as slowly and deeply as she was able, letting the pain in her gut begin to recede under the touch of Will’s fingers. Catherine had shown him several massage techniques that along with exercise, helped Mac through the pain caused by her abdominal adhesions ripping apart. God, she loved the gentle strength of his hands.

“Better?” Will asked as he felt some of the tension in her body start to dissipate.

“Mmnn . . . better,” Mac echoed, closing her eyes.

Suddenly, Will curled toward her, placing his face against her stomach inches from where his fingers remained, lightly caressing the mottled puckered skin over the spot where an assassin’s blade had entered his wife’s body four years before on a dusty street in Islamabad.

“I caused this,” he said, in a voice horse and overwhelmed by guilt and anguish, “I’m the reason you’re suffering like this . . . this pain is on my head.” 

“Are we talking about the knife wound? Because you most certainly are not to blame for my getting stabbed, Billy . . . .”

“That's not how Jim sees it,” he interrupted.

Mac felt her anger spike. “Jim! What does Jim Harper . . . .” And just as quickly, her indignation died. Of course, Jim had noticed her emotional health, or lack of it, in Islamabad. Of course, Jim blamed Will. “It was June,” she said calmly. “When I was stabbed, it was the end of June. His . . . the . . . anniversary . . . that year was particularly hard. Jim . . . noticed. But that had nothing to do with my being stabbed no matter what Jim thinks. You had nothing to do with it.”

“You can't believe that any more than I do.” He brought his head up slowly until he was looking into her eyes. “The ‘anniversary’ . . . are you going to tell me that I had nothing to do with that?” He turned his head and looked away. “I'm disgusted with myself . . . if I'd just kept it in my pants . . . .”

“What?! What th’ bleedin’ hell?! What did you just say?!” Mac scrambled up on her elbows as fast and as far as her swollen belly would permit, then struggled to sit up. In her haste and fear, she over-compensated for her newly alien body whose girth seemed to expand exponentially with each passing day, lost her balance, and fell awkwardly against her husband. Despite her belief that she was locked in a life or death struggle for Will’s mental health, or perhaps because of it, she was overcome by the absurdity of her physical condition and began to giggle. After a moment, she heard him join her, a snorting sort of laugh that he couldn't suppress once she had started.

“Come here, you big lug.” She pulled at him, and gave a sexy chuckle deep in her throat. “You are so responsible for this.” Bringing him down to her, she crushed her mouth to his, and then whispered against his cheek, “Billy, I have never thanked God for anything the way I thank Him for bringing you and your . . . children . . . into my life.”

She kissed him again before he could respond, deep and lingering. When they came up for air, she continued, “you could never do to me what your father did to . . . what your father did.” She smoothed back the lock of hair that had fallen across Will’s forehead. “You are too kind and good and compassionate and empathetic . . . you are too strong and self-aware.” She wished with all her heart that Charlie could be there for Will. Charlie would know what to say to restore Will’s equilibrium. But Charlie wasn't there. 

“What, Mac?” Will asked, noticing her pensive gaze at nothing.

She shook her head and smiled at him in the way that always warmed him and made him feel that he could change the world. “Besides,” she said, “I'm always a step ahead of you.” 

Now she removed his clothes as she spoke, and punctuated her words with kisses and teasing licks, beginning at his chin and moving down his neck and torso to where the little trail of blond hair on his belly led to the prize. “You see, Billy . . . I . . . always . . . want you. I want . . . you . . . every minute . . . of . . . every day . . . I . . . want . . . every taste . . . of you . . . every inch . . . of you . . . all . . . the time . . . always.” She took him into her mouth. 

For some reason that he couldn't comprehend, Will had been fighting arousal. Now, he gave himself up to it . . . gave himself up to her. He wanted to tell her that she was the only woman with whom he had ever made love, with whom he had ever truly been intimate. He wanted her to know that with all the others, not just while she was gone, but before her, as well, he had disconnected from sex as soon as it started. Yes, he had performed, but that's what it had been, a performance from an actor on a stage. Physically, there had been pleasure, sensation, release, but emotionally, he had been floating above it all in dispassionate isolation . . . until MacKenzie McHale . . . until MacKenzie was in his ear, naming him Billy, reading Dostoyevsky to him in a peach-coloured silk dress. 

He moaned and fought back the urge to come in her mouth. He tried to move her to a position where he could pleasure her as well, but she resisted. She had released him when she'd sensed that he was close to ejaculating, and now, she brought her lips to his ear. “Lie still, Billy. This is my party. Let me do this while I'm still able.”

She straddled his hips and took his penis in her hand, marveling, as she frequently did, at the velvety smoothness of the tautly stretched skin. Then she guided and supported him while she lowered her body and took him inside. He gasped at the intensity of the sensation that came from opening her, entering her without first bringing her to orgasm during foreplay. For an instant, he feared that he would hurt her, but quickly realized that although she was tight, she was wet and hot.

She'd felt him tense and correctly read his concern. “I'm ready, Billy,” she whispered, arousal evident in her throaty voice. “You can't hurt me. I told you, I want you always,” she laughed softly, tracing small circles on his chest with her hand. 

She began to ride him, slowly at first, raising herself off and lowering again in languid movements, then faster, as she seemed to forget him and seek her own pleasure. Smiling, up at her, Will put his hands on her thighs and felt the well-toned muscles ripple rhythmically under his touch. Then, he too fell into a trance, knowing only the movement of skin against skin and hearing only the blood pounding in his ears. Finally, when he sensed that she had reached the breaking point, he moved his hand to the soft folds between her legs, found her clitoris hard and swollen and began to rub small light circles against her skin. 

She moaned and pushed harder down onto him, opening her legs a little more and angling backward. He matched her thrust for thrust, as his fingers moved faster and faster. Her breath began to come in moaning gasps, punctuated by a barely audible, high pitched wheeze at the end of each expiration. He remembered that little wheeze from years ago, he suddenly realized, but before he could reflect on it further, all thought was driven from his mind. He heard her inhale loudly and sharply, and saw her head fall back, as her vaginal muscles spasmed around him, squeezing in waves, and he too let himself go. 

As their contractions gradually became farther and farther apart, MacKenzie slid off and rested limply by Will’s side. “I think I shall be able to feel my legs in about four to six weeks, and walk again sometime thereafter,” she observed. Her husband snorted a laugh and kissed her hair.

“I think it will be somewhat longer for me,” he replied, gently trailing his fingers across her belly. “I love you,” he said quietly. And his phone went off. Will grouped around for his pants and retrieved the offending devise from his pocket, intending to decline the call. “Shit!” he said when he looked at the caller ID. “It's Jim,” he explained to Mac, as he tapped the “Accept” button and put the phone to his ear.

“Jim, uh, hi,” Will said, trying to focus on something other than MacKenzie’s body and make his voice sound normal. 

“I need to know if you want to lead with the shooting and how . . . .”

“What shooting . . . I . . . I'm not sure I follow . . . .”

“You haven't heard? Christ, Will, what have you been doing? You must have gotten the alert on your phone. And where are you? You know what time it is?”

“I . . . Uh . . . I . . . We . . . .”

Jim was in the process of noticing that Will’s voice sounded strangely disoriented and thick when he heard a sound that he'd not heard very often in the years he'd known MacKenzie, but nonetheless would recognize anywhere. She was giggling. The fog lifted and Jim Harper knew exactly what Will McAvoy had been doing. Christ! It was almost noon on a Monday. They acted like a couple of teenagers. He thought about a conversation at Hang Chew’s the week before in which Sloan had insisted that she had pried it out of an “unimpeachable source,” that since his release from the Federal lock-up, Will had been maintaining a twice a day pace. Oh, well, if anyone deserved to be giggling at 11:00 AM on a Monday, Jim figured it was Mac.

“Never mind, Will,” Jim said hastily, just in case Will was getting ready to tell him what he'd been doing. “Let me tell you what’s coming down. We got an alert about fifteen . . . twenty minutes ago . . . Fox has already gone live with it . . . Apparently, a twelve-year-old, seventh grader in Sparks, Nevada, brought a gun . . . .” Will groaned and Jim heard Mac asking what had happened. “Yeah,” Jim continued, “it's really fucked up. Anyway, he opened up with a semi-automatic handgun on the playground of his middle school . . . .” Jim paused to allow Will to relay the news to Mac. “Will, why don't you just put me on your speaker.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry. Okay.” 

When he heard the slightly hollow sound of Mac’s voice saying, “hi, Jim,” he said “hi,” back and continued, “so, this kid . . . they’re withholding his name so far . . . shot another kid, also twelve, in the shoulder. That kid’s just hurt from what we can find out. But, then, a teacher tried to stop the shooter, talk to him, and the kid shot the guy . . . killed him . . . .”

“Oh, God,” Mac sighed.

“Yeah. Guy’s name was Michael Landsberry. He was a math teacher. Forty-five. One report says ex-Marine Corp. Like Charlie.” Jim said the last in barely a whisper and cleared his throat. “Died on the playground, I think. We’re still trying to tie down the details. Another kid was also shot in the stomach when he tried to help Landsberry. No word on his condition, but I think he's alive.”

“The shooter?” Will asked.

“Dead,” Jim replied flatly. “Self-inflicted. There’s a report that he left notes for the school and his parents, so it sounds like suicide was the idea all along.”

“This child . . . you said he was twelve?” There was compassion in MacKenzie’s voice.

“Yes.”

“A disturbed twelve-year old with access to a semi-automatic weapon.” Now the compassion was laced with disbelief. “What will it take? Or, will we just never learn?” Jim said nothing, and Will broke the silence.

“Alright. Keep on it. Get me all of the details you can. And, see if you can get me a couple of guns . . . .”

“What?” Jim and Mac asked in unison like some sort of demented Greek chorus.

“Yeah. Call museums or the Smithsonian. See if anyone will let us have a musket that was in use when the Second Amendment was passed. Then get me the kind of handgun the shooter used or the closest thing to it. I'm on my way in.”

“Right, boss.”

As Jim disconnected, Mac looked at her husband, who had jumped up, brought her to her feet, and with a hasty brush of his lips across hers, began to gather up and sort out their clothes. She beat back a wave of grief for Charlie Skinner, and smiling, wondered if she would ever tire of the sight of their Billy like this . . . Don Quixote, saddling up for another day.

 

By the time Will got to the interview part of the A block segment on the Sparks shooting, Mac had made her way to the control room. Standing beside Jim, during a commercial break, she watched the feed on the monitor and saw Will speaking privately to twelve-year-old Jose Cazares and his mother, Marisela, telling them what to expect and trying to put them at ease. 

“We’re back in ten, Will,” Jim said in a clipped business-like manner. Will relayed the news to the Cazares, and looked into camera one. “Five, four, three, two and . . .”

“Ladies and gentlemen, I'm glad you could join us this evening because I have the honor of speaking with a brave young man, Jose Cazares, a student at the Sparks Middle School, who witnessed this morning’s events,” Will said in rounded even tones, as the camera pulled back to frame the monitor to his left which displayed the feed from the Cazares’s living room.  
“He joins me here with his mother, Marisela Cazares, from their home in Nevada. What happened this morning, Jose?” Will asked.

"I was hanging out with my friends, and then we heard a loud gunshot and we thought it was firecrackers. So then we looked back toward where we saw the noise, and we saw a kid pull out his gun and shoot another kid in the arm.”

“Where exactly were you?” Will’s voice was gentle.

“On the yard . . . by the basketball court,” Jose responded.

“About how many other kids were out there with you?”

“I don't know . . . .” Jose canted his head to the right, contemplating his answer. “Maybe twenty. They all started running when they saw the kid get shot.”

“Did you run?”

“Not at first. I froze because he was aiming his gun right at my chest. And I looked at the gun and my chest like, 'He's going to shoot me.' But then, I turned around and I ran. I heard a gunshot, and I thought he shot me. Then I looked back, and he shot a kid in his leg, arm and stomach."

“Did you see Mr. Landsberry?”

“Yeah,” Jose replied softly, and his mother wrapped her arm around him more tightly. 

"What did you see, Jose?"

“After the first kid was shot, Mr. Landsberry turned around about the same time we did and people were running. But he walked right up to the kid with the gun. He told him to stop really quiet. He told him it would be okay if he put the gun down. He said he'd help him. Then he took another step closer and held out his hand. He was like ‘put the gun in my hand,’ and I thought the kid was going to . . . going to do it, you know . . . .” Will nodded, as Jose drifted off into his own thoughts.

After a few seconds of silence, Will prompted, “but he didn't, did he, Jose?”

Jose shook his head, suddenly looking younger than his twelve years. “The kid yelled out, ‘no!’ And kept yelling at him. And then he shot him . . . Mr. Landberry. Right here.” The boy’s hand rose to his chest. “He killed him.” Jose began to cry against his mother.

“Jose loves math because of Mr. Landsberry,” Mrs. Cazares told Will, stroking her son’s hair. She was clearly a recent immigrant and her Hispanic accent was thick. “He was a great teacher . . . a brave, brave man. I am thankful for everything he did. He gave the children the chance to get away.”

“Jose,” Will began again, so softly and gently it brought tears to Mac’s eyes. The boy turned a tear-stained face half into the camera. “Thank you for doing this.” The boy nodded. “Do you know why it's important that you are doing this?”

Jose squared his shoulders a bit. “Be . . . because it's important for people to know that Mr. Landsberry was a hero. He was a soldier . . . in Afghanistan, you know.” Beside him, Jim heard Mac’s intake of breath. “Nothing scares him. He was a hero.”

“Yes,” Will replied, “ telling everyone about Mr. Landsberry’s a very important reason, but it's not the only reason. The other reason is to make the people out there listening to us ask themselves why this sort of thing is happening, and what we can do to stop it from happening again. You and your friends should not have had to encounter this kind of violence. No child should have to live with the threat or reality of violence. We need to take on this fight, and find a way to stop gun violence . . . all violence. Will you join me in this fight, Jose?”

“Yes, sir.” The boy sat up straight and drew his fingers repeatedly across his eyes until the tears were gone. Jose and Will talked a little more about stopping gun violence and by the end of the interview, Jose was smiling for the first time. Mac was reminded of watching Will with Charlie’s grandsons. Will, who was so afraid of screwing up as a father, was a natural.

Will started to wrap up. Jim had already allowed the segment to go over it’s allotment, figuring there was no way he'd interrupt, and something else would just have to be cut. Suddenly, Mrs. Cazares interrupted in her heavily accented English, “Mr. McAvoy, you are a good man, a very good man. I am happy you are going to be a father.”

Will was clearly taken aback and overwhelmed by the comment. He said nothing for a few moments as emotions played over his face. “Say, ‘thank you,’ Billy,” Mac said aloud, and just as Jim was about to repeat the directive into his microphone, Will said, “Thank you, Mrs. Cazares. I'm going to do my best.” Then he turned to face into the camera and told the audience he'd be right back with more of News Night. 

The second interview, which came in C block, didn't go as well. It was with a representative of the National Rifle Association, and Will could not seem to keep his distain for the man in check. He hadn't realized that Mac was in the control room, until he heard her voice in his ear saying, “at the risk of sounding like She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, be likable, Billy. You’ll lose your effectiveness if they can portray you as some sort of anti-gun fanatic.” 

Will let up on the guy, who relaxed into his message to the point that he analogized the “relatively modest loss of life in Sparks” to a military mission with acceptable casualties, acceptable in the name of preserving Second Amendment freedom.

“No!” Will interrupted, likability be damned, “you, Sir, will not come on my show and use my airtime to suggest that because only one woman was widowed . . . only one set of parents are grieving the loss of their son, that what happened in that school yard this morning was somehow tolerable collateral damage in the name of freedom. This was not a military engagement, with a definable and vetted objective. This was an emotionally and mentally unstable twelve-year-old . . . child . . . in possession of a semi-automatic hand-gun . . . a weapon with no sporting purpose, except, arguably, target shooting, designed to do exactly what it did do today . . . kill and maim.

“We need to go to a commercial break now,” Will continued, giving the NRA spokesman no time for rebuttal. “When we return, we’ll talk more about the Second Amendment.”

“Not so likable, but I loved it,” Will heard Mac say in his ear when they cut to commercial. 

When he returned, Will began by reading the text of the Second Amendment: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” and explaining to the audience that in 1789, when those words were written, there were no government stockpiles of guns for use by members of state militias. Therefore, if the federal government could confiscate or outlaw private gun ownership, the states would be unable to meet their security needs, which, in the early years of the federation, were seen as being potentially at odds with the interests of the federal government or another sovereign state.

“A few hours ago,” he continued, “with the assistance of David Fitzhugh, an Assistant Curator at the Smithsonian Institution in our nation’s capital, I had the opportunity to learn to load and fire the type of ‘arms’ about which the Second Amendment was written. Here’s the video of that lesson.” The screen filled with Will, still dressed in his pre-show jeans and a royal blue cashmere sweater over a white t-shirt, holding a flintlock rifle, and talking to a pleasant-looking young man who handed him a paper tube. Fitzhugh pulled out an old-fashioned stop watch and stood poised to begin timing Will. 

Will joked that this was his fourth time loading and firing the rifle. Then, nodding at Fitzhugh to begin the test, Will put the end of the paper tube between his teeth and tugged it off, spitting paper and a small amount of black gun powder to the ground. He then poured the powder into the opening where the long barrel of the rifle met the stock. Closing the chamber, Will up ended the rifle and dropped the paper tube that also contained a lead bullet into the rifle barrel. He removed the long cleaning rod from its holder and pushed the lead firmly up into the barrel and replaced the rod. Finally, he put the rifle to his shoulder and pulled the trigger. In a burst of smoke and flash of fire, he propelled a single lead slug into a target off camera.  
“So?” Will asked.

“A minute and twenty-two seconds.”

“Well, that's four seconds off my last time.” Fitzhugh smiled a “not too bad” smile. “Okay, you tell the audience how quickly you can do it.”

“Fifty-one seconds. That’s my best time. Usually it takes me about a minute.”

“So, just so everyone is clear, I can fire a shot every minute and twenty-two seconds and you, after years of practice, can fire one every minute or so?”

“Yes.”

“And that was true of every-one in 1789?”

Fitzhugh couldn't quite keep the obviousness of the question off of his face as he answered, “of course,” but the honesty of the expression made Mac like the segment enormously. 

The camera pulled back from the image of the two men frozen on the monitor to capture Will at the anchor desk once again. 

“I also fired another gun today. This one was at the Federal Bureau of Investigation practice range here in New York.” Then, he grinned impishly at the camera, and said, “Yes, the Feds and I have made up.” Mac laughed out loud along with the rest of the guys in the control room, and undoubtedly, millions of Will’s fans across the country. 

“This gun,” Will continued ruefully, “was no joke. It was a Ruger SR9C, a semiautomatic handgun that an unconfirmed source has told ACN is the make and model used by the boy in Sparks, Nevada, this morning to wound two of his fellow middle schoolers, kill a beloved seventh and eighth grade math teacher, and finally end his own life after only twelve years.” 

Will turned silently to the monitor, which at Jim’s nod, came to life, and Will’s recorded voice filled the control room. “I'm here at the FBI practice range with Special Agent Molly Levy. Molly is a personal friend, and ex-military, who served in Iraq with my wife . . . well, Mac was an embedded reporter with CNN, so she didn't actually serve . . . .”

“Yeah?” Molly interrupted. “Tell that to the guys whose lives she saved with one of those.” She gestured to the gun lying on the practice rail. 

Will looked dumbfounded, but instantly recovered with the instinct of someone who had spent a decade doing live television.

“Are you fucking kidding me!” Mac rounded on Jim, as the control room guys looked at her with something approaching awe. “She said that and you left it in! You fucking left it in!” she repeated before she could stop herself.

“Hey,” Jim said, raising both hands in defense and gesturing at the monitor where Will now held the Ruger, preparing to load the cartridge. “The Editor-in-Chief called that one.”

“Right,” Mac mumbled, “and I'm sure you tried hard to talk him out of it.” Jim turned away so she couldn't see the smile on his face.

Meanwhile, on the video, Will and Molly were comparing the lead slug he had retrieved from his flintlock rifle target with one of the rounds he was loading into the Ruger. “ . . . so,” Will was saying, “I've got nine rounds in the gun and another seventeen in this magazine that I'm going to load into it, each of which is capable of doing hundreds of times more damage to the human body than this lead slug from 1798. You are going to time me Molly, and see how long it takes for me to empty all of them into that target over there. Ready?”

They both put on ear and eye protectors, and Molly tapped to open the stopwatch app on her iPhone. “Ready?” she repeated, and Will nodded.

He began firing and had unloaded the contents of the Ruger into the target before anyone in the control room could take a breath. His hands were a blur as he slammed the 17-round clip into the gun and emptied it.

“Three point six seconds,” Molly called out as the report of the last round died away. “Not bad,” she added, and looked at the target. “Not bad at all. And, here I thought Mac was the only crack shot in the family,” she added under her breath. 

"So that was twenty-six rounds fired in 3.6 seconds. So about eight bullets per second,” Will said, and as Molly nodded, the monitor froze and the camera pulled back to Will at the anchor desk.

“We’ve come a long way in the two hundred and thirty-three years since the Second Amendment was written, which incidentally, says nothing about gun ownership as a personal freedom, only about gun ownership as a means of equipping a militia, whose purpose is the security of one of the sovereign states. In 1789, we, Americans, had the ability to project a lead ball, once a minute, if you’re very practiced, with just enough force that, if you’re lucky, you might stop a man in his tracks or kill him if you hit the right organ. Now, we can spew out bullets designed specifically to rip and tear great, irreparable holes in the human body with enough speed that we can hit and, most likely kill, twenty-six of our fellow men in about three and a half seconds. That means that I could shoot four hundred and thirty-three rounds from the Rugar in the minute that it would take Mr. Fitzhugh to shoot one round from a barrel load flintlock rifle.

“Ask yourself whether Thomas Jefferson . . . could he have even conceived of the existence of a weapon such as the Ruger . . . would he have concluded that freedom dictates that such destructive force must be available to every citizen of this republic. Ask yourself if you agree that it must.

“I'm Will McAvoy, and this has been News Night for October 21, 2013. The Capital Report is up next so stay tuned . . . and stay safe.”

MacKenzie walked up to the news desk as Will was slowly and dreamily removing his ear bud and unclipping his microphone. She leaned across it, facing him, as she had done hundreds of times in the last three years.

“What are you thinking?” she inquired.

“I was thinking about Charlie coming in here the night of the show we did on the Gulf oil spill, the night . . . you came back to me. He gave me an ACN coffee mug with bourbon in it, and told me that we had just done the news again, that we'd . . . by which he'd meant . . . I’d . . . not been afraid to have an opinion. He reminded me that Murrow’d had an opinion and McCarthy’s days were numbered, and Cronkite had had an opinion and Vietnam War coverage was changed forever.” Will smiled at her. “He also told me that he'd fucking loved what I'd said at Northwestern. Did he know that it was you?” 

"First, of all, Billy, as I've said repeatedly, IT WAS YOU. And, no. Not back then. Later, after I'd told you, I also told him I'd been in the audience.”

“I want to do something about this, Mac. I want to be part of the solution to the epidemic of gun violence in this country. I need to figure out how to do more than just sit here and talk.” He fell silent, staring into space. “I wish he were here,” Will concluded softly.

Mac sighed. “Well, the current President of ACN can't share a mug of bourbon with you, but she can tell you that she fucking loved everything you said tonight. I'm so proud of you, Will. Really, just so proud. You and Jim put together a show that was the equal of anything we ever did together, and I'm going to tell him that. It was beautifully done.” Noticing Jenna waiting in the wings, she added, “we need to clear the set, and Jenna needs to get your suit, shirt and tie back to wardrobe.”

He nodded and stood, and walking up to her, put his arm around her waist. When he pulled her closer, she whispered in his ear, taking the chance that Jenna was still too far away to overhear, “let's go home, Billy. Pride always makes me horny.”

 

Will awoke in his childhood bedroom. He could hear them through the walls going at it again . . . his father’s voice somewhere between a snarl and an insistent whine. He pulled his pillow over his ears in an attempt to block out the noise. He hated them fighting, but he hated this more. The pillow did no good. He still could hear his mother’s voice, begging, “please, no. Please, don't. Don't. No. No.” 

Then, something cold, like a shock of ice water, ran through him. He looked down at his body in the dim light to find that it wasn't the body of a child, but that of a full grown man. He heard the voice again, “Please, please, not yet . . . not now. Don't. Please, don't.” The imploring tone, was tinged with panic now, and the pitch was slightly higher than he remembered his mother’s voice. 

He got out of bed just as he had those many years before, and walked toward the farmhouse kitchen. He saw them . . . his father pushing her up against the counter, his jeans and underwear around his ankles. His mother turned her head to face him. But it wasn't his mother’s terrified eyes that he saw. His father had MacKenzie! 

Will strode toward them, knowing that this would be the night he would kill his father. 

As he approached, his father faced him, the old-familiar defiant sneer in place. “Wha’ ja think your doin’, Willy boy?” he asked, as the smell of liquor wafted toward and sickened Will.

"Let her go," Will said menacingly. "Let her go, or I'll kill you.”

"Not if I kill you first.” Will saw the knife in his father’s hand. It was a large butcher knife that his mother used to cut up the pig carcasses that came into the kitchen from the farm. His father turned his body and jabbed the knife in Will’s direction. Frantically, Will looked around for a weapon, but there was none at hand. Only a half empty whiskey bottle on a counter six or seven feet away. Will’s father’s eyes seemed to glow with the alcohol-fueled anger and insanity that Will had always seen before the old man lost control. Again, the knife waved menacingly in Will’s direction.

“Don’t. Don’t. Please don't.” The voice didn't sound like Mac’s any longer, and when Will turned to look at the woman who had spoken, he saw his mother. “Please don't,” she repeated, but made no effort to stop his father or reach for the arm that held the knife. Will wasn't sure if she was asking his father not to hurt him, or the other way around.

Then motion came as a flash and a blur of color. He father lunged for him. The woman turned back into MacKenzie who screamed and brought the side of her hand down hard against the arm holding the knife. But John McAvoy was either too strong or too quick, and Will felt the blade plunge into his side in a sudden burst of pain and fire.

Will sat bolt upright. Sweat poured in rivulets down his face, and his pulse pounded in his ears. His breath came in rapid, nasal snorts, like a Triple Crown contender at the end of The Preakness. His right hand was splayed against his side, and looking down, in the soft glow of MacKenzie’s night light, he expected to see blood and guts spilling out between his fingers, but he saw only the soft cotton of the dark blue t-shirt he had pulled on after their lovemaking to go to the kitchen and fetch a late-night snack for his pregnant wife.

“Jesus,” he muttered, trying to clear his head. “Jesus.” Will wrapped his body around his sleeping wife, drinking in the slightly verbena scent of her hair and skin. He pressed her flesh against him, and allowed the solid reality of the moment, the reality of his life with this woman who loved him to dispel the lingering malaise of the dream. He thought about a lot of things in those minutes. He had done such harm to her. He would never be able to make amends for the hurt he had caused . . . the despair and punishment he'd visited upon her . . . for costing her William’s life . . . for torturing her with Nina.

“Please, don't. Don't. No. No.” He felt MacKenzie’s body move next to him. He froze, hearing the words from his dream spoken aloud. She pushed at him as if trying to drive him away, as she became more agitated. “No, please, please, Danny, no. Not now. Not yet.” Now, Will’s heart skipped a beat. Danny? Dan Shivitz? Had he tried to . . . seduce . . . force himself on MacKenzie? Or had she allowed him? Had they been lovers? 

No! He was not going to let himself go down that road . . . whatever had happened had nothing to do with the life he and Mac were building. He loved her. He trusted her. That was all that mattered. 

Suddenly, Mac grabbed onto him, clinging with what seemed to be desperation. “Don't . . . don't . . . don’t . . . take him . . . please . . . Danny . . . please.” Then, just as suddenly, she released him and sat up, blinking, her eyes slowly coming into focus. “Billy . . . Billy . . . you’re here?”

“Yes . . . yes, Kenz . . . always.” He wrapped his arms around her, thinking of Jim telling him that all she’d ever wanted in the desert was him. “You were having a dream.”

“I . . . I don't . . . remember.”

“It's okay. Don't try.”

“Did I wake you? Was I screaming? Why are you awake?”

“It's okay.” He pulled her down against him, and into her favorite sleeping position with her hear tucked against his shoulder. Absently, he began to play his fingers across the bulge that was his daughter. “No, you weren't screaming and you didn't wake me. Actually, I'd had a bit of a nightmare myself, and that's what woke me up.”

“Do you remember it?”

“Parts,” he sighed. “I'll tell you about it sometime when I won't get in trouble with Catherine for interrupting your sleep . . . .”

“You’re not . . . you didn't interrupt my sleep. I woke up on my own; remember?”

"Okay. For not helping you go back to sleep then," he rejoined, kissing her hair, and moving his hands soothingly over her back and thighs. After a few moments, he was rewarded with a sleepy yawn.

“We’re quite the pair with our dreams,” MacKenzie sighed. “I think it was Aeschylus who said, ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’”

“Sleep, Mac,” Will whispered. “You need it. Charlie needs it, and I do too.” He could see her eyes growing heavy. Even Mac’s legendary insomnia was no match for the hormones of pregnancy.

“Mmmmm. I love you, Billy.” 

“I love you, Kenz. Go to sleep.”

She did. And, he lay awake, thinking in the pre-dawn darkness . . . thinking about never confronting his father with his choice of MacKenzie . . . never letting John McAvoy know that he had become confident in the man he wanted to be . . . thinking about facing up to the harm his fears and cowardice had caused . . . everything that had been lost . . . and all of the people whose loss it had been.

It came to him as a surprise, what he wanted to do. He pondered Mac’s reaction for a long time because upsetting her was the farthest thing from his intention. But the more he considered it, the more sure he was that it was the right course for him. He would pick the time to tell her . . . ask her, really . . . and he smiled at the thought that since she was not only his wife, but the President of ACN, he needed to get her permission to take the time off and have Sloan and Elliott cover News Night for a couple of days. He would tell her that he needed . . . wanted . . . to go . . . go alone to England . . . and tell her father what had happened . . . tell Ted McHale, without Mac there to protect him, what his weakness, fear and insecurity had done to her and to their son.


	18. A Walk in the Woods

As it turned out, Will would not go to England. Rather, at Ted McHale’s suggestion, they met at a fishing lodge in Nova Scotia, Canada. “I've more time for travel than you, I'll wager,” McHale had said and Will didn't argue.

“Trout Point?” Mac had asked when Will hung up the phone after being informed that the Ambassador had booked a two bedroom cottage for Friday and Saturday nights. “Daddy positively loves that place. I’ve never been there . . . well, I've been to Nova Scotia . . . years ago . . . but not to Trout Point. It only opened in ’01 or ’02. I was back in England by then. And, I don't really hunt or fish, so . . . .” She shrugged. “But I hear that the food is absolutely first rate.”

The call from her father had made her nervous, and she was running a constant monologue as she tended to do when her nerves were getting the better of her. The idea of her husband and her father talking about her first pregnancy was unpacking more emotional baggage for MacKenzie than Will had counted on. He was already berating himself for not anticipating this, for once again, being a selfish bastard and thinking only of himself and his emotions.

“Mac . . . I . . . .”

“No. It's fine, Billy. I'm good.” She smiled what she hoped would be a reassuring smile. “We talked about this and I understand. Really, I do. Everything will be fine. A few days alone will give me the chance to catch up on some work and have dinner with Leona.” Mac squeezed his arm. “I'll be right here when you get back.”

 

“What do you think he wants to say?” Margaret McHale had asked her husband when he hung up from making his plans with Will. Worry creased her forehead and infused her voice.

“I don't know. He didn't let on.” The Ambassador shook his head as if to dispel an unpleasant thought. “I just can't believe that he wants to tell me that he’s made a mistake . . . that he doesn't love her.”

“Are you insane? You saw them together over the Holidays and when we were in New York for the reception. No one could have a change of heart after being like that. And, the baby . . . Mackie says Will’s read so many books and articles about pregnancy and childbirth, he could sit for the obstetrical certification boards.”

“What then could it be?”

Margaret McHale removed her reading glasses, and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “That he's ill,” she said softly, “and he hasn't told Mackie.”

Ted looked stricken, and then resolute. "Whatever it is, we shall just have to rally around them.” He wrapped his arm around his wife's shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “William is tough,” he continued. “So is Mackie. They won't give up without a fight. We all just need to be strong.”

 

Mac had been right, Will thought, getting out of the town car that the lodge had sent to meet the Nova Star ferry he had taken from Portland, Maine. Both the ride on the water and in the car had taken him through some incredibly spectacular scenery, and Trout Point Lodge was set in what was possibly the most beautiful wilderness he had ever encountered. The day was crisp, clear, but not quite what someone who had grown up in Nebraska would describe as cold. While the leaves left on the trees were more brown than red and gold, the surrounding late Fall landscape was still magnificent. 

“William, my boy!” Ted McHale’s voice boomed out, as he emerged from the front door of the lodge and bounded down the stairs. His pewter-grey hair was a bit longer than Will remembered it, and he looked tanned and rested. With his ready smile and square jaw, Ted looked to Will to be exactly what he was, a man born, bred and educated to lead. He grabbed Will in a tight embrace. “It’s so good to see you.”

"It's good to see you, Sir. You’re looking well.” 

“Thank you. I've lost a few pounds,” Ted McHale said putting his hands on either side of his gut and pinching a diminishing roll of fat. “Maggie says it’s all got to go. She keeps me on a very short and remarkably bland dietary leash.”

Will chuckled. “Yes. I know the feeling. But, you know, as much as I tease Mac that I'm happy to eat tasteless food for the rest of my life if that’s the price of being married to her, I'm equally determined not to put back on any of the weight that I dropped in the detention center.”

The conversation concluded in an awkward pause, with nothing more to be said on the subject of weight and fitness, and neither of them wanting to broach the subject of why Will had asked to see the Ambassador.

Finally, the older man broke the silence. “Let's get your bag to our cottage and go out for a walk, shall we? Unless you’re hungry from your journey and would like a snack.” He looked at his watch. “It’s a little late for elevenses. But, then, the cats are away, so to speak.”

“No. I'm fine. A walk sounds good.” 

“Alright. Follow me.”

In their cottage, both men changed into hiking boots with woolly socks, and casual pants . . . jeans for Will . . . flannel shirts and leather jackets.

“Mackie used to have a shirt quite like that one,” Ted McHale said when Will emerged from his bedroom.

Will smiled. "Mac used to have a shirt exactly like this one, but no longer. I've stolen it back.”

They left the cabin, walking in silence for a little while, each munching on an apple he'd removed from a bowl of fresh fruit, compliments of the management. Then, the Ambassador brought up the broadcast on the Sparks, Nevada, shooting. Even though Will felt that the choice of subject matter was contrived . . . he could see that Mac’s father was dying to ask him what the fuck was going on . . . the Ambassador’s compliments seemed genuine and his suggestions for two follow-up segments on gun policy in America and Europe were, as usual, incisive. 

They climbed a reasonably high ridge and when they reached the summit, Will decided that it was time. “You look just like her right now, you know,” Will said glancing sideways at MacKenzie’s father. “Kenz has an expression that she gets where her facial muscles are so well schooled into repose that she appears calm. But if you know her . . . really know her . . . you can see that she’s terrified.” The Ambassador gave a slight, self-deprecating twist of the lips that anyone who knew MacKenzie would instantly recognize.

Will stopped and turned to face the older man. “Lord Ailesbury, I will never harm your daughter . . . ever again. I swear it.” 

Ted was taken aback by Will’s use of his title, and then realized that it was a largely unconscious underscoring of the gravity of the oath. "William . . . I . . . I . . . ." He wanted to say that it had never crossed his mind that Will would do anything that would hurt Mackie, but it had, he realized.

Will shook his head to signal that there was no reason for McHale to say anything in reply. “I will love MacKenzie until the day I die. Taking care of her . . . protecting Mac and Charlie and whoever comes along next are the priorities of my life. If I screw that up, none of the rest of it matters.” He took a deep breath and finding the cool, clean air invigorating, took another before continuing to speak. “This isn't about the future . . . what I came to say . . . it's about the past. It's . . . I want you to know from me, what I did back then . . . when Mac tried to tell me what had happened with Brenner. I feel that you need to know the truth, and if you can't forgive . . . well, we’ll just find a way of going on, I suppose.”

As many times as he'd rehearsed what he wanted to say in his head, Will suddenly didn't know where to begin, and realized that this preamble was only confusing his father-in-law and adding to the tension. Just begin, he told himself, begin somewhere and let it unfold.

“When I was with Mac the first time, six years ago, I lived in perpetual . . . terror, really . . . that she would leave me. It wasn't helped by my father’s constantly telling me that she would.” This last was said almost as an aside, and Ted wasn't sure if he'd heard Will properly. “I'd not had much of a role model for a healthy male-female relationship growing up,” Will continued, “and until Mac, I'd dealt with that by just never allowing myself to get emotionally involved with anyone. To go from never loving and not needing anyone to feeling like I'd simply stop breathing and life would end if this one person were to reject me . . . .” Will drifted off and concluded the thought with a gesture that combined amazement and helplessness. 

“It got worse when I took Mac to have Thanksgiving with my family in Nebraska that last year. My mother was already dead, so they never met, but my father . . . well, my father’s feelings about Mac . . . Mac and me . . . were . . . complicated. As soon as he saw that I cared for her . . . was in love with her . . . he got on my case about what a bad choice she was and how she was just playing me. He was threatened by her . . . the beauty, the accent, Cambridge . . . and, hell, he didn't even know about you and the whole Ailesbury business.” Will smiled at Ted. They had stopped walking along the ridge now, and were standing in a grove of trees. Will could smell the loamy earth which somehow reminded him of the smell of a freshly tilled field in his childhood. 

“He was . . . attracted to her,” Will continued, earning a raised eyebrow from the Ambassador, “and, at the same time, bitter and jealous of me . . . .” 

Will trailed off as he heard Habib’s voice in his head from their last session, “fuck yeah, you show up with this young, stunning, brilliant, educated British aristocrat hanging on your every word, looking at you with those hazel eyes like you’re the prize of a lifetime, and what’s he got? What’s he ever gotten from the rotten hand he'd been dealt in life?”

“She tried hard to make him like her, but he . . . .” Will shook his head again. 

“Did your sisters and brother also . . . . Well, I mean, how did they get along with Mackie?”

Will looked at him as the implication of the question sunk in. “Like everyone does . . . Rosemary especially adores her . . . how can you not at least get along with MacKenzie? You taught her well. Mac makes a great first impression. God knows I was never the same.” As Will had intended, this brought a smile to the Ambassador’s face. 

“The situation . . . my father . . . it had nothing to do with anything that Mac did.” Will looked earnestly at his father-in-law. “He'd been beating on me all my life, and she . . . her existence . . . just provided him with a new weapon.” Will looked off into the distance. “One, against which I had no . . . defenses . . . .” Will found himself lost in the memory of the dream he'd had the night he decided to have this conversation . . . the kitchen, John McAvoy holding Mac, his father’s fist wrapped around a knife, and Will looking around and finding his only weapon out of reach. Somewhere in the back of his brain, Will heard Abe Habib ask, “your only weapon?” 

In the silence of Will’s daydream, Ted pondered the wisdom at this juncture of asking a question to clarify whether Will’s words, “he'd been beating on me all my life,” were meant to be taken literally or figuratively. He suspected the former from the degree to which John McAvoy could apparently undermine his son’s self . . . confidence? . . . no, it seemed from what Will was saying to go deeper than confidence . . . self-perception, Ted thought, was a better description. On the other hand, Ted reflected, even without physical violence, an emotionally abusive parent can inflict terrible damage. 

Will resumed talking. “He started getting me alone and telling me that she'd dump me as soon as a younger, better looking man came along, you know, that sort of thing. He got off on seeing that those thoughts made me squirm, no matter how much I denied it to him. The more I defended her faithfulness, the more he knew that he was tapping into a vein. He enjoyed seeing his words make me question Mac . . . No, that's not right . . . question myself.” Will swallowed hard. “My father could smell fear . . . especially in me . . . well, in my mother, too,” Will added, “and he fed on it like a drug.”

Poor Mackie, Ted thought, she hardly figured into this, except as a pawn. This was the first time that Ted could recall that Will had ever spoken of his parents, other than a cursory introductory acknowledgment that his mother was deceased and his father was still living in Nebraska, where he'd grown up. Mackie, too, never spoke of Will’s childhood or upbringing. Ted had thought that it was just that Will had been older, already over forty, when they met, and so childhood seemed a long time removed. Also, he knew that Americans were less concerned with placing people in terms of family and upbringing, but now, he was beginning to form suspicions that there was a darker reason for the silence surrounding Will’s past.

“I'd gotten really good at ignoring everything he said, or at least I thought I had.” Will laughed a brittle, bitter laugh. “Come on,” he said, “let's keep walking. Movement might make this easier. I hope you know where we are going,” he added, looking around at the untamed wilderness.

“As long a we keep to a marked trail, they all eventually return to the lodge,” McHale assured him, when they started once again to move. As Ted McHale walked along in companionable silence, Will kept talking. He described how he had wanted to tie MacKenzie to him and how he'd “exploited” her problems with the pill she'd been prescribed in the hope that a pregnancy would keep her from leaving him. 

“William,” Ted said at last when Will seemed to have finished this portion of his narrative, “not to argue, but I simply can't accept this idea that you coerced or tricked or ‘svengalied’ Mackie into getting pregnant.” He held up a hand to forestall Will from responding. “Just hear me out. I know my daughter, and I know how she was raised. If there was one thing that Maggie impressed on Mackie . . . on all of the girls . . . it was that they were 150% responsible for contraception. Mackie would never have let you make that decision for her.” But of course, Ted realized that was exactly what had happened. “Actually,” he began again, “let me put this another way. There is not another man on the planet with whom she would have behaved as she did with you. When Mackie allowed you to prevail upon her not to use the foam or a condom, it was because she wanted to have a baby with you, and if you wanted the same thing, well, then, all the better.” Will looked unconvinced but didn't argue.

“You were sure that you wanted to marry her back then, were you not?” When Will nodded, Ted had to control himself from asking whether it had occurred to Will that asking Mac to marry him would have been a more effective way to tie her to him than impregnating her. But, of course, Ted realized, in Will’s paranoid state, he couldn't have run the risk that she would say no to a proposal.

“I know for a fact that she felt the same way about you,” Ted continued. “I'm sure MacKenzie didn't care if she was pregnant and everybody thought it was a shotgun wedding, or whether you two would just be like Brad and Angelina and fill a house with offspring without ever saying, I do.” Will seemed to be trying to smile but the sadness on his face reminded McHale that they hadn't filled a house with a child.

"I know she lost the baby,” he said, “but millions of women have an early miscarriage and go on to have beautiful families just like you and Mackie are doing. There’s no suggestion that the miscarriage is compromising her current pregnancy, is there?”

“No.” Will thought of the adhesions, but they weren't technically from William’s birth, nor were they a danger to Charlie. He knew that both Catherine and Dan Shivitz were monitoring Mac very closely, and were concerned about placental bleeding or tearing, but there had been none so far. “No,” he repeated. Ted looked relieved.

“But there’s more,” Will added miserably. “It wasn't . . . she didn't have a miscarriage.”

Now, it was Ted McHale who stopped walking. Had Mackie lied to him? But why? She could have told him she’d had an abortion. He wouldn't have condemned her. “I don't understand,” he said at last. 

"What has Mac told you about my reaction to her disclosure of her reconciliation with Brenner?”

Almost nothing, Ted thought. “Very little,” he replied. “She said that she'd confessed to you that she'd slept with Brenner a few times while she was in the relationship with you, and that you were hurt and angry and didn't want to see her. I know now that her time with Brenner occurred right at the beginning of your relationship, but back then, I assumed that it had happened around the time she disclosed it, and she did nothing to disabuse me of that belief.”

Will started to say that Mac’s silence was to protect him . . . that if she'd said that her “cheating” had occurred in the first weeks of their being lovers then she would have had no way of explaining why his reaction was so extreme except to tell the truth and say that he hadn't seemed to hear her. Hadn't been willing to hear her. In his head, he played her voice from the recorded phone messages, thick with tears, saying, “please, Billy, please, please just listen to me . . . hear what I have to say . . . then if you still don't want me . . . .”

“To be frank with you, William,” Ted continued, seeming to need to talk, “that was a very bad time for Mackie and me, as well. We really didn't come out of it until she was . . . until I saw her at Landstuhl. I simply could not fathom why she would risk everything that she had with you for the likes of Brenner, and I'm afraid I wasn't very good at hiding my . . . dismay.” He shook his head sadly. “I don't think that I gave her much opportunity to talk about it. I deeply regret my actions.”

Ted looked around, thinking that he recognized the clearing in which they were standing, and spotted a rough-hewn “bench” made out of the logs of a fallen tree. “Let’s sit for a moment. There's something I'd like to say,” he added, walking over and seating himself. Will followed, and waited for McHale to continue. 

“Let me tell you something about Mackie and Brenner. Mackie’s upbringing was . . . I don’t really know what word to apply . . . unusual, I suppose, might express it best. In a way, she was just another American kid, living in New York. But,” he paused, “there was always the diplomatic service aspect to our lives . . . traveling . . . Mackie meeting public figures at an early age. And then,” Ted paused again, and gave an ironic little snorted laugh in Will’s direction, “there was the whole thing that you so charmingly refer to as ‘the Ailesbury business.’ You know,” he turned now toward Will, “when she was very little, and my parents were still alive, the staff in Surrey used to be required to give a slight bow or bob a curtsy in her presence, and address her as ‘m’lady.’ Can you imagine? She was just a little slip of a girl. Maggie put a quick stop to all of that nonsense when she became the lady of the house, but . . . .” He shrugged. “It does something strange to you, having adults defer to you that way.

“Anyway, I think that the hook with Brenner was actually that he treated her so abominably. Not that she's a masochist . . . I don't mean that she wanted to be hurt. I just think that no one had ever acted quite so superior to her before and it fascinated her. He had this way of acting like she was beneath him, but yet she was the only person who might actually be good enough to earn a place by his side. It seemed like a bald manipulation to me, and he wasn't that good of a journalist, but it held her in thrall for much too long.” Ted sighed. “I can't imagine what Reese was thinking selecting Brenner to write an article about what you and Mackie were doing with News Night.”

“What? Reese?” Will looked hopelessly confused. “Where did you get the idea . . . ?” Now, it was Will’s turn to sigh. “It wasn't Reese. It was me.”

“But MacKenzie said . . . .”

“I can imagine what Mac said. But, I did it . . . to hurt her . . . to see them together and prove to myself that I could stand it . . . in the hope that she would choose me . . . to rub Brian’s nose in the fact that Mac and I were working together. I don't know . . . it was fucked up.”

Ted only nodded, and stood. “I don't know about you, but I'm getting chilly. Let's walk on, shall we?”

As they made their way back to the lodge, Will described the events leading up to Mac’s disclosure of her time with Brian, as she had explained them to him . . . her missed period, the pregnancy tests, and the decision to have no secrets as they started out making a family. He described what he could recall of her telling him about Brian at breakfast . . . his assumption that she was leaving him, his rage, his pain, his need to escape.

“I left her there,” he concluded, not able to bring himself to repeat the details he still suppressed, details that his joint therapy sessions with MacKenzie had filled in . . . that he'd stepped over her sobbing, begging, grasping for him on his way out the door. “I grabbed up my coat and my keys and told her I'd be back in two days and she should be gone. I said that she was dead to me.” Will, who had been looking straight ahead at nothing while he talked, now turned to face his wife’s father. “I remember . . . remembered just now something I've suppressed all these years . . . I stood for a second outside the door. I could hear her sobbing. I wanted to go back. I wanted to forgive her. She was . . . she is . . . the only thing I’ve ever really wanted in this world. I stood there and then the anger came up again, and I couldn't . . . wouldn't be weak . . . I wouldn't be like my mother.”

Ted McHale didn't quite understand the reference to Will’s mother, but rather than interrupt, he filed his question away for later in the conversation. 

"I didn't go back.” They had reached the lodge and Will abruptly sat down on the steps and put his head in his hands. “I didn't open the door. I didn't listen to her and in that moment, I condemned her to a . . . a lifetime of pain.”

Again, Ted wanted to ask Will what he meant, but elected to remain silent.

“I got a hotel room and tried to fill the emptiness with liquor. At some point, that day or maybe the next, I called my sister Rosemary’s house. I'd let it filter in . . . the knowledge . . . that Mac might be pregnant.” Will turned to Ted. “I'd noticed things, you know. I knew she'd not had a period. Sometimes, hers weren't . . . aren't . . . regular, but this was longer apart than usual.” Will sighed. “Anyway, my sister wasn't there. My father answered the phone. I don't know why in God’s name I talked to him. I guess I was just that fucking drunk. I must have been out of my mind to have talked to him. Jesus!” Will spat out the name, and jumped to his feet. Ted rose too, as Will began pacing. 

“He did just what I should have expected. He fucked with my mind, and I wasn't sober enough to . . . .” Will drifted off shaking his head. “That’s no excuse. I should have . . . I let him . . . I let him convince me that if she was . . . pregnant . . . it was Brenner’s baby . . . that’s why she’d told me about sleeping with Brenner again. He'd warned me, he said. 

“He knew he was hurting me . . . what he was saying, he knew . . . . I've never understood . . . I've never known . . . why . . . why he always wanted to hurt me.” 

“William,” Ted McHale said softly. “How old were you when he started hitting you?”

“Two.”

“Oh.” The shock was apparent in Ted McHale’s voice. He was prepared for Will to have been a adolescent or even a child, but a toddler was more horrible than he'd supposed. “Well.” Ted tried to formulate a response, but nothing came. Finally, he just whispered, “Bloody hell.” The words sounded like a prayer. They sounded like MacKenzie. They sounded like a father’s love and concern. They undid Will.

At first, Ted thought that Will was laughing, and maybe he was. But then, Will doubled over, wracked with sobbing, and slowly sank back down onto the stairs. “William,” Ted sighed, sitting himself beside his son-in-law. Then, he took the younger man into his arms as he would have one of his own children, and just said nothing.

They took a break for dinner. Talking about politics and current affairs. It wasn't until they were sharing glasses of scotch in their cabin that Will began again to talk about his break-up with MacKenzie. He described how she'd been gone from his apartment when he returned a few days later, leaving behind the necklace of his mother’s that he'd given her, how she'd called in sick and then asked to be relieved as his EP, and how he'd gotten out of his CNN contract and asked Charlie Skinner for a job at ACN. 

“I left Washington without seeing her again. She was leaving me messages and sending me emails that I was ignoring. Then, in June, they stopped.”

“In June?” Ted repeated. “She was home in the beginning of June. Then she went to Afghanistan. She . . . .” Ted paused, not sure of what he wanted to say, or how to say it. “I . . . she and I . . . I don't know if what went on between us had anything to do with her stopping trying to reach out to you. But . . . I didn't . . . help . . . her.” Ted McHale rubbed his forehead as if he were developing a headache. “I failed my daughter. I believe I'm the reason she gave up. I believe I'm the reason she ran away.”

“No,” Will said kindly. “You and Mac should talk about this. You drove her crazy,” Will added, trying to smile, “but she left Surrey early because she was afraid that her mother . . . or you . . . would discover that she was pregnant.”

“What?” McHale asked in disbelief. “No. No. That's not possible. She was so thin . . . she didn't eat or sleep . . . you should have seen her.”

“I know,” Will acknowledged. “If only I had.”

“No. I didn't mean . . . I meant . . . .”

“I know what you meant. I've heard Mac describe her condition. I spoke to Darius Walker . . . You remember him? CNN?” At Ted McHale’s almost imperceptible nod, Will continued. “He said that being with her during the weeks after I left for New York was like watching an orchid die.”

Ted McHale had been determined to keep his emotions in check, using one of his practiced techniques of keeping the glowing, laughing Mackie he had just seen in her wedding dress in the forefront of his mind, but the imagine of his daughter, miserable and gaunt, that Walker’s words conjured was overwhelming. His eyes burned with tears and his lips trembled as he tried to talk. In the end, he could only shake his head.

“Her obstetrician threatened to hospitalize her, and she was having trouble at work . . . concentration issues, as I understand it,” Will continued, his voice more controlled than he felt. “That's when she went to Walker, and he offered her the gig in Afghanistan . . . he didn't know about the baby, of course . . . no one did. Walker insisted that she take some time off to . . . pull herself together. She had no where to go . . . so she went home.”

"Dear God," McHale mumbled. "I can't imagine what this is going to do to Maggie.” He looked up at Will, who had started pacing the floor. “You’re sure she hadn't already miscarried . . . aborted . . . .”

“No. I'm sorry. Mac was pregnant when she arrived in Kabul.” 

“In Kabul? In June?” Now a new thought formed in the Ambassador’s mind. “June? My God, Will, how far along was she?”

“She says twenty-three weeks, but Mac doesn't count it right. It was actually twenty-five weeks of gestation.”

“Twenty-five weeks! Oh!” Ted said it as if reality had hit him like a gut punch, expelling all of the air from his diaphragm. “That’s . . . that’s . . . .”

“On the brink of viability,” Will finished for him, clinically repeating a phrase that Dan Shivitz had used.

"I . . . I . . . I don't know what to say.” Ted looked suddenly older, his posture slumped, as he stared morosely at the amber liquid in his glass before bringing it shakily to his lips and taking a slow sip. After a lengthy pause, he spoke again in a raspy whisper, “what happened?”

“Around supper time on her second or third night in Kabul, her back started hurting worse than usual, and she couldn't make herself eat the food she'd ordered. She says that she should have noticed that something was changing . . . but, she was tired, so she curled up and fell asleep. She awoke a few hours later, recognizing that she was having true uterine contractions. She says that she was still in denial . . . until she started bleeding.”

When Will got to the place in his narrative where MacKenzie wrapped their tiny son in an old Cornhuskers t-shirt, and baptized him, “William Duncan,” he broke down again more completely than he had outside on the lodge steps telling Ted about his father. For his part, Ambassador McHale had been watching and listening for a long time, silently, allowing tears to stream down his face, unsure of for whom he was weeping . . . Mackie, Maggie, Will, his grandson or himself. Mackie . . . angels of mercy . . . he could hardly make himself think about his daughter going through a birth alone, thinking it was too late for help, and wanting only her baby’s father. 

But, in the present, Will was the object of his concern. Ted could feel guilt and anguish radiating from Will’s every pore. Once again, Ted wrapped his arms around his son-in-law and held tight. After a few minutes, however, he became concerned that Will was shaking and seemed unable to bring himself back from the well of despair into which he had plunged.

“She didn't die, Will,” Ted said, falling back on his old habit of presenting a positive balance when one of his children or his wife seemed trapped in negativity. 

“A piece . . . of . . . her . . . did,” Will gasped out between sobs, thinking of the nightmares and the bottles of pills sitting in her medicine cabinet.

“Of course . . . of course,” Ted hastily replied, chastened by his own stupidity, “how insensitive of me . . . of course, a piece of her died . . . a piece of you both died. You lost your son. I'm so sorry, my boy. Of course, you need to grieve . . . there’s no hurry . . . no hurry . . . none at all . . . .”

By the following afternoon, Will would complete everything he'd come to say. He would tell Ted McHale all he knew about the baby’s death, Mac’s hemorrhaging and near demise from blood loss, and the messages left for him on his cell phone. He would describe Armstrong’s recollection of the maid at the Intercontinental finding MacKenzie later that morning, unconscious, with her son’s cold body in her arms. They would each thank God for the helicopter medics and evacuation to the U.S. military hospital, and for the young, freshly-minted doctor, who saved her life and fertility, and became the wunderkind of high risk obstetrics, and ultimately, his wife’s doctor once again. But, that first night, as they sat in the darkness that surrounded the cottage in the Canadian wilderness, it would all wait. That night, Will felt only grief and a father’s forgiveness.


	19. Rock Me on the Water

MacKenzie stood on the edge of a path in London’s Green Park. It was a sunny day. Children ran shrieking and laughing over the thick dew-kissed grass. Nannies and mothers with prams and pushchairs strolled along the concrete paths. Mac thought that she spotted her sister-in-law with Tessa and Teddy, her niece and nephew, but when she called out and the woman turned toward her, the face was unfamiliar. This will soon be me, she thought, walking with my daughter in the park.

“That will never be you,” an American-accented voice said forcefully into her ear.

Mac turned to find Nina Howard standing beside her. Nina looked to be six or seven months pregnant, the same as she, Mac thought, but when she reflexively looked down at her own body she was wearing the tight-fitting pencil skirt and silk blouse that she had worn when she'd walked with Nina in Central Park, and Nina had told her that she had a source who said that Will had been stoned the night of the bin Laden broadcast. 

“What did you expect?” Nina asked scornfully. “You’re barren. You can't give Will children. And, you know how much he wants a child.” Nina rubbed a hand across her belly and smiled brightly at Mac.

Mac recoiled as the import of Nina’s words and gestures filled her head. “No. No. No,” she repeated, as Nina’s smile grew into a Cheshire Cat-like grin.

“What’s the matter?” Nina asked in a lilting voice. “Oh, did you think that you were the only one who could cheat?” She laughed merrily. “I’m carrying Will’s son. I'm going to have Will’s son and I'll have Will too.” 

Mac tried again to speak, but this time her throat closed convulsively and no words would come out.

“You thought he'd gone to talk to your father? You fool. He's been with me. He’ll always be with me. I can give him so much more than you ever can. You had your chance, MacKenzie, and you ruined everything. People don't get second chances.”

Mac turned and ran, as hot tears filled her eyes and her hands went numb. Her knees felt rubbery and her legs thick, as if she were running through mud or water. Her lungs burned with every breath that she struggled to take. She fell to the ground gasping for air, and looked around. Nina stood only a few meters away, looking at her and laughing heartily. Mac struggled to rise again, but couldn't get enough air into her lungs to muster the necessary energy. 

Then, her vision of the park blurred and darkened. She suddenly found herself holding her breath underwater. It was cool and black, with only a tiny pinpoint of light above her. All she had to do, she knew, was open her mouth and take in the water and it would all be over. Her lungs burned and she longed to take that last breath of liquid. Then, quietly, almost imperceptibly, she heard her mother’s voice, saying, “Mackie, Mackie, you must believe . . . believe in him . . . believe in what you know to be true. Swim to the light, darling. Swim. Swim.” 

After only a moment’s hesitation, she swam. Pushing off and kicking with all of her might, she swam furiously toward the light . . . toward Will. Up. Up. She climbed. She didn't think that she could make it before her lungs burst, but she swam on. The light grew larger until . . . .

MacKenzie shot bolt upright in bed. The panic of the nightmare still had her by the throat, and her eyes were wide with terror. She could feel her pulse pounding in her ears and her heart beating against her ribs. He hair was matted and damp. A trickle of cold sweat made its way between her breasts. She gasped for breath as she had in the dream, and her chest felt constricted as though someone had wrapped steel bands around her rib cage while she was sleeping. She cast around frantically and blindly for her husband before slowly coming to the realization that she was in their bed alone.

She leaned forward, struggling to breathe, bending her elbows, and resting her hands on each side of her thighs. She felt something large and hard pressing on her lap, and would have laughed with relief at the realization that it was her own pregnant belly, if she could have taken in enough air to do so. She could hear wheezing, and felt her neck and shoulder muscles engaging in the effort of inflating and expelling air from her lungs. She wanted Will, but knew that he was in Canada with her father.

This isn't hyperventilating from the nightmare, she thought. It wasn't going to pass now that she was awake. This was the lining of her airways swelling shut and the smooth muscles that wrap around them spasming, constricting, conspiring to kill her . . . and her baby. She needed to take action. 

She moved to the edge of the bed, leaned over and pulled open the top drawer of her nightstand. She rooted around inside until she found both the small rescue inhaler and the spacer. She hadn't needed to use it in a quite a while and was vaguely aware that she needed to prime the inhaler. She shook it and released two puffs into the air, waited a moment and repeated the action. Then, she pushed the inhaler into the spacer, shook it again and put her lips around the mouthpiece. 

She tried to wait a minute between each of the four puffs of medicine she was instructed to take for a severe attack, but she wasn't sure that she had managed, and she couldn't tell if she felt better. Some of it was that she was still caught up in the emotions . . . fear and sorrow . . . that the nightmare had engendered. Starting to panic, she put the inhaler into her mouth and repeated the four puff cycle. She wished desperately that Will were there, and tried to imagine his voice telling her that everything would be alright, that she just needed to breathe slowly and relax, but it wasn't helping very much. She thought about calling him, but quickly rejected the idea. At best, she’d frighten him for nothing, and at worst, he’d do something crazy like pack up and leave and try to get back to New York. Besides, calling Will would also get her father alarmed and involved, and that was the last thing she wanted to do.

Should she call Jim? No, she thought, she'd bothered him enough in the middle of the night for one lifetime. But maybe just this once more would be okay. Then, her heart sank as she remembered that he'd taken advantage of Will’s mini-vacation away from News Night to go to Washington and visit Maggie. He couldn't get to her from 250 miles away, and she certainly wasn't going to interrupt their time together just to hear his voice.

But the idea that both of the people she relied on most were away added to her panic. She couldn't slow her breathing down and her pulse was racing. This isn't good for the baby, she thought. The baby . . . she didn't feel the baby moving! MacKenzie froze and put her hands on her stomach. She pushed, but Charlie didn't push back. Again, and still no movement. Terrified, she grabbed her cell phone from the nightstand and dialed.

Rivka Shivitz awakened to the sound of her husband's phone chiming and vibrating on the shelf next to the pillow on which he continued to sleep the sleep of the dead, or in this case, the sleep of an exhausted physician who earlier that evening had concluded a twenty-six hour labor and delivery of high-risk twin boys. 

“Daniel . . . Daniel . . . .” She shoved at his somnolent body. “Dan, wake up . . . your phone’s ringing.” Picking up the devise, Riv glanced at the caller ID. “Daniel, MacKenzie’s calling you . . . wake up.”

“Wha? What?” Shivitz rolled over and tried to shake the sleep out of his head.

“Your phone,” Rivka said, extending her arm and resting the hand holding the phone against her husband’s naked chest. “It's MacKenzie.” 

“Shit!” Shivitz swore, taking the phone, looking at the time, and tapping the screen to answer the call. “Mac, what’s the matter?”

“I'm sorry, Danny . . . I sorry . . . to wake you. I . . . I'm . . . .”

How like Mac to start out with an apology, he thought, then the wheeze in her voice registered. “You’re having trouble breathing?” he asked, interrupting.

“Yes . . . I had . . . a nightmare . . . and woke up . . . I was drowning . . . in the nightmare . . . and when I woke up . . . I couldn't breathe.”

“Did you take albuterol?”

“Yes . . . eight . . . puffs.” Suddenly, Mac’s voice became higher and more panicked, “Danny . . . Danny . . . I can't . . . feel the baby . . . she’s not moving!” The statement ended in a sob.   
Shivitz, who was sitting up now, with his bare feet on the floor, ran a hand through his hair. “Okay, Mac . . . Okay . . . . Slow down. Is Will there? Can I speak to Will?”

Rivka could hear the barely controlled distress in her husband's voice, and she wrapped herself against his back for comfort. Please God, she thought, let everything be alright. If something happened to MacKenzie McHale’s baby, or, God forbid, to MacKenzie herself, Rivka knew that Daniel Shivitz would never be the same. She heard Dan say the word, “Canada,” and then continue to reassure Mac that if she hadn't passed out or even felt lightheaded, it was highly unlikely that her asthma exacerbation deprived her of sufficient oxygen to have harmed her unborn baby. 

“But anyway, Mac, I want you to call 911. I'm sure everything is . . . .” Riv could tell that MacKenzie was arguing with Daniel because her husband started sputtering disjointed syllables. Finally, she heard him draw a deep breath, and take control of the conversation. 

“Okay, okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. I'll call Jon Fischer and see if he's around . . . actually, he lives pretty close to you and Will . . . and can go over and take a look at you. If he can't . . . then I don't care how freaked out Will’s gonna be about it . . . I'm calling an ambulance and you’re going to the ER.” 

After a few more reassuring words to Mac, Shivitz hung up and dialed Fischer’s cell phone. “She’s alone? Will’s in Canada?” Riv asked. “I wondered why he wasn't on tonight,” she added when her husband nodded.

Although he wasn't happy about being awakened, Fischer agreed to make a house call to check on MacKenzie. Shivitz called her back, told her to expect the doctor within 15 minutes, hung up and put his head down in his hands.

“He’s starstruck with Will,” Dan explained without looking up, when Riv expressed some surprise that the exalted pulmonologist would give up his bed and go out in the middle of the night. 

“I guess celebrity has its privileges,” she replied, putting her arms around her husband. They stayed like that for several minutes while Dan tried to calm his own breathing. “Go, Daniel,” his wife said quietly. “You’ll feel better. Go and get her and bring her back here.”

“Drive?”

“God will understand. She shouldn't be alone, and it's time I met MacKenzie McHale.”

Dr. Fischer had finished giving MacKenzie a nebulizer treatment and was packing up to leave by the time that Dan Shivitz arrived at her apartment. Charlotte McAvoy had awakened and started moving around again, and despite assurances not to be concerned, her mother was feeling chagrined for panicking and causing both men to leave their families in the middle of the night. 

“l’m sorry, Danny,” Mac apologized again for the hundredth time after Fischer left. “I shouldn't have called . . . practically the middle of the night. I was so frightened when I couldn't feel her moving . . . and the nightmare . . . in the nightmare, I couldn't . . . have children . . . .” As if overwhelmed by the emotions of the dream, Mac’s composure cracked. 

“Come here,” Shivitz whispered, taking her into his arms. “It's okay. Everything’s okay, Mac. You’re safe. The baby’s safe.” He sat down and pulled her onto his lap, rocking her as she cried the way he rocked Avi, his infant son, and the way he had done with her years before. He wondered if she would remember, and almost as if the thought had triggered it, she spoke.

“You’ve rocked me like this before, haven't you?” she asked hesitantly.

Impulsively, he kissed her hair. “Many times, Mac, many, many times. In the beginning, it was the only way you could fall asleep.”

“God, I was a mess . . . am a mess . . . .”

“A mess, Mac? That’s not exactly the word I'd use. I think you may be the strongest, most resilient person I know.”

“I know you don't really want to talk about it. But I’ve tried and tried on my own . . . but I don't remember much . . . anything, really . . . of the time after . . . from the hospital until I was back in the States . . . in Atlanta.” Mac turned and looked at Dan. “When I was doing the segment . . . filming in Kabul . . .”

“It's okay that you don't remember.”

“I went back to the hotel,” Mac said suddenly, “and you came and got me.”

“Yes.”

“I remember . . . being in a room with you. You were . . . comforting me. You’d rock me and sing something . . . 

“I can't sing, Mac.” He smiled.

“Okay . . . But I remember. . . what was it?”

Danny began to rock them, as he chanted softly, “Yit'gadal v'yit'kadash sh'mei raba b'al'ma di v'ra khir'utei . . . “

“That's it!” MacKenzie exclaimed excitedly. “I remember! I remember you holding me and saying this. It's a prayer, isn’t it? What is it?”

“The Mourner’s Kaddish.”

“Oh,” she said softly. 

“It seemed to comfort you.”

“Go on. Keep going, please.” And she laid her head against his chest.

“v'yam'likh mal'khutei b'chayeikhon uv'yomeikhon  
uv'chayei d'khol beit yis'ra'eil  
ba'agala uviz'man kariv v'im'ru:  
Amein. Y'hei sh'mei raba m'varakh l'alam ul'al'mei al'maya  
Yit'barakh v'yish'tabach v'yit'pa'ar v'yit'romam v'yit'nasei  
v'yit'hadar v'yit'aleh v'yit'halal sh'mei d'kud'sha.

From somewhere in the depths of long suppressed memory, words surfaced in MacKenzie’s mind. “Brick . . . who,” she whispered tentatively. She felt Danny’s throaty laugh through the side of her face that lay tucked under his chin.

“B'rikh hu,” he corrected softly. “Blessed is He. You remembered, Mac. After all of these years, you remembered.”

“Tell me about it. I want you to tell me everything . . . about the hospital . . . about the baby . . . William . . . I know that you had him . . . his body . . . cremated. I need to know, Danny. It's important . . . please.” 

“Tomorrow. I'll tell you tomorrow. I promise. You haven't asked me why I came?”

“What? Oh, no . . . I . . . Um. Why did you come?”

MacKenzie slept most of the way to Westchester. When they arrived, Rivka took charge. Handing Avi to Dan, she escorted MacKenzie into the guest room and put her to bed, saying that she was getting the full “Jewish mother” treatment. Mac liked Rivka immediately from the moment she had brushed aside Mac’s apologies about barging into her home in the middle of the night, by telling her that she’d been home with a baby for the last ten months and would take adult companionship anywhere and anytime..

Rivka Shivitz was extremely easy to talk to, and before Mac knew it she was deeply involved in a conversation about the nightmare and her panic at not finding Will beside her.

“I don't know why I'm being this way. I miss him. It's crazy. So much has been crazy. We had so much time apart . . . not just when I was in the Middle East, but after I came back to the States . . . came to ACN. For three years, he hardly touched me . . . once . . . Once he hugged me . . . Actually it was probably a good thing that it was only once . . . because that night . . . that's when I started dreaming about . . . about Kabul . . . .”

Rivka could tell by the look on MacKenzie’s face that she'd failed to keep a mask of professional detachment in place as the realization of what it must have been like for Mac to be held in the arms of the father of her dead child after so much time. Mac looked down at her hands, embarrassed to have provoked such emotion in a stranger. Even so, she couldn't stop talking.

“Then, we went through such a horrible time . . . Nina . . . and Genoa . . . . Election night, I thought that Leona and Reese were going to sack us all, so I provoked Will into firing me. I wanted to be able to say that he'd done it . . . make it look like it was because of Genoa . . . I thought it might help salvage his career, give him some credibility. But, I really hurt him. I goaded him on a personal level . . . and he got back at me by hurting me. It was . . . nothing, though, compared to the knowledge that I'd not see him again, not work with him . . . I just sort of floated through the show after that feeling numb, and empty and at the same time so full of despair . . . .” Mac looked away until she was sure the tears in her eyes would not fall.

“I was waiting until we were done enough so that I could leave it to Jim to finish up . . . and, I guess, really, it was, but I still couldn't make myself leave . . . him . . . .” Mac’s voice trailed off again. “Suddenly, I was standing in a darkened alcove, listening to Will tell me this inane story about a boy shredding paper.” She looked up at Rivka, grinning at the memory, her eyes, still teary, but now shinning with pleasure. “And then, he was fumbling with a box, taking out a ring . . .”

Rivka looked down where Mac was twisting her engagement ring as she always did when nervous, and her eyes widened at the 5-carat diamond. She thought Daniel had gotten carried away with her ring, but McAvoy had obviously gone insane. “Awful, isn't it?” Mac giggled. “Sometimes I feel like Kim Kardashian. My mother actually suggested that we buy a smaller ring for everyday wear. But,” Mac looked down at the ring, “this is the one he was holding when he told me he'd never hurt me again, and that no matter what I said, he'd be in love with me for the rest of his life, when he pressed his body against mine and twisted my hair in his hands, when I knew I was safe again . . . after being afraid . . . all the time . . . for so long.”

Now the tears fell. Rivka sat down on the bed and hugged this woman she barely knew. “I just want him here,” Mac said, swallowing hard, and wiping at her eyes. “God, what’s the matter with me? Will was locked up for two months and I wasn't like this . . . so dependent . . . calling Danny . . . invading your home like this.”

“MacKenzie, you’re seven and a half months pregnant, honey. You’re entitled to be dependent on Will, and on Daniel. In fact, and I say this not only as the mother of a ten-month-old, but as a PhD in clinical psychology,” Riv grinned, “you’re entitled to be completely batshit crazy for the next twelve to fourteen months.”

As if on cue, they heard Avi’s cry cut the quiet of the sprawling suburban house. Riv listen for a few moments. “Gotta go. That's a hunger cry and Daniel’s talents and resources in that department are limited.” She smiled at Mac.

“I'm so glad that Danny found you.” Mac gave Rivka an impulsive hug.

“Yeah, I like you too, Mac. And I see why Daniel is . . . so fond of you. Try to sleep. It's Shabbat, a day of rest. Stay in bed as long as you want. We’ll have a nice day and when Shabbat’s over, Daniel will drive you home.”


	20. Homecomings

Sir Edward Arthur Michael McHale, Earl of Ailesbury, former Ambassador of Her Majesty’s government to the United Nations, and her current Ambassador at Large to various global hot spots, leaned his head against the cold plastic of the window beside seat 2A of Air Canada Flight 860 from Halifax to Heathrow, and closed his eyes. He hoped that somehow he had been able to say the right things, that he'd been a comfort and a help to the man his Mackie loved more than life itself. He hoped that he would be able to find the right words to relay all that he had learned to Maggie, the woman who had been his life for more than forty years. He had texted her to say that there was no need for worry, that William . . . Will wasn't ill and that it was the past that their son-in-law had wanted to talk about. However, he’d not spoken to Maggie from Canada because he hadn't wanted to discuss any of it with her until he'd had the time to reflect on the best way to proceed.

He replayed parts of the conversations of the past two days in his mind. “He . . . my father . . . wanted to kill me,” Will had said. “You can tell when someone wants you dead. It's in the eyes.” McHale had nodded, remembering the time he had been held hostage and looked into the eyes of a man who wanted him dead, or at least cared little whether he lived or died. But, Will . . . dear God . . . William had been talking about his own father. “I knew he wanted me dead . . . but what I've never known . . . is why.” Ted had seen pain, confusion, and, yes, guilt and fear in Will’s eyes. “Do you think . . . that . . . that the inability to love your child . . . can it be inherited?” he'd asked.

It had taken a moment for the import of the question to register, Ted reflected. Thank God he'd finally seen it, and swallowed his initial inclination to say that he didn't know. Instead, he'd said, “not by you. I know it wasn't inherited by you. Mackie’s said she's seen you being a father to Charlie Skinner’s grandsons, and you always know exactly what they need, and they both know that you love them.” Will had looked so grateful it had broken Ted’s heart, and moved him to talk about his own childhood.

“My parents had a loveless marriage," Ted had explained. "It was wartime and the young man my mother’d fancied was killed in Belgium. My father was available and suitable, and she had reached the ripe old age of twenty-three, which put her in danger of being a spinster. It wasn't exactly a marriage of state . . . more a marriage of convenience and desperation, but I'm sure that when I was conceived my mother was thinking of England. Neither of my parents ever struck me or my brother, but they were unhappy people, and I always felt that I had failed them in some fundamental way. I know many things about me were a great disappointment to my father.

“When Maggie was pregnant with Mackie, I was terrified. I realized that I had no idea how to be a father . . . and worse, I had never experienced a father’s love . . . at least not the kind of love I wanted to give my child. What if I couldn't do it? What if it didn't come naturally? What if my behavior was hurtful?

“I needn't have worried, and neither should you. When that little girl slides into this world . . . into your hands . . . there will be no room for doubt. You’ll look at the expression on Mackie’s face and know that making this child is the most important . . . the most perfect . . . thing that you have ever done together. And you will have each other so that when one of you fails as a parent . . . and,” McHale had chuckled, “there will be . . . what is it that Tommy and his crowd say? . . . oh, yes, ‘epic fails’ . . . there will be epic fails by both of you in the parenting department, but you will have each other to encourage you both to do your best.”

He had certainly had his “epic fails,” McHale reflected, listening to the drone of the jet engines that were carrying him back across the Atlantic. None more so than his reaction to MacKenzie’s disclosure of her break up with Will because of her infidelity with Brenner. He had never given her a chance. He saw that now. He had fanned the flames of her guilt with his disappointment. When he should have recognized and eased her pain, he had driven her underground, into solitude and away to Afghanistan. Maggie had been so angry that she had left him, gone to the London house alone and asked him not to follow. Things had stayed strained between them until they were summoned to Mackie’s deathbed in Germany. Now he would get to tell Maggie that his insensitivity had not only caused their daughter incalculable pain, it had almost taken her life.

 

MacKenzie flew into Will’s arms the moment he walked through the door and dropped his overnight bag in the foyer. She clutched him tightly, burying her face in his sweater so that he would not see that tears had sprung into her eyes. He, in turn, had buried his face in her hair, and then against the side of her throat, drinking in her scent, feeling the bulge of her abdomen pressing against him. 

“I missed you, Kenz.”

“Show me.” Her voice was breathless, and as soon as his lips found hers, she felt the jolt of the kiss travel down to her core, and then, the familiar ache and sensation of dampness between her legs. He trailed kisses down her throat while she tugged off his leather jacket and let it fall to the floor. Her hands pulled his shirttails out of his jeans as his moved under the sweatshirt she was wearing to caress the skin of her naked back. She had the fleeting thought that their days of tearing each other's clothes off in the living room were numbered. When they had a child older than an infant, they would not be able to do things like this anymore. 

He walked her to the couch, never taking his lips from hers, and moving his hands away only long enough to help her pull the sweater off over his head. Then, she unbuttoned his shirt, and ran her hands over his naked chest. 

"I like it when you don't wear an undershirt,” Mac whispered, taking each of his nipples and rolling them between her thumb and forefinger the way he did hers. She was rewarded by a deep guttural sound from Will’s throat. “Like that, do you?” she teased. Bending down slightly, she replaced one of her hands with her mouth, sucking hard and feeling the nipple stiffen as it filled with blood. “One erection . . .” She moved her mouth to his other nipple and repeated the action. “Two erections.” She smiled up at him as her fingers started to undo the buckle of his belt. Will seemed transfixed, she observed. His hands had returned to her hair, which he had tangled in his fingers. His mouth was open slightly and his breath was coming in ragged snorts through his nose. Lust had turned his eyes to a deep, dark blue. 

“Three erections,” she cooed, and lowering the zipper, pulled his jeans and underwear down his hips, and then to the floor. He stepped out of his clothes and kicked them away. She watched as a tiny drop of clear liquid emerged from a microscopic hole and clung to the underside of the glans. Impulsively, she lowered her head and licked it off. She loved the clean salty taste of the lubricant Will produced during foreplay. He shivered and seemed to be deciding whether to pull her head back up to his or push it down farther on his erection. She made the decision for him by doing both. First, taking him into her mouth and sucking hard, and then releasing him and raising herself up and kissing his lips.

He could taste himself on her, which excited him wildly. In addition, the fire in his groin told him that he’d been away too long to last much longer. He moved his fingers under Mac’s panties and finding her hot and wet, took control.

 

The front door of the lovely old house in the Belgravia section of London opened almost as soon as the taxi glided to a stop at the curb, and a stately woman in her early sixties, casually dressed in slacks and a sweater, emerged with a worried smile on her face. Coming up the walk, Ted McHale stopped for just an instant and stared. Forty years ago, Margaret Morgan had been, to borrow a phrase from his son-in-law, the most attractive woman he had ever met in real life, and the sight of her still made his heart lurch with excitement and desire.

"Maggie," he said, reaching the door, dropping his bag, and leaning in to kiss her lips. “Have I told you lately that you are the best thing to ever happen to me.”

"My, my,” she chuckled, reaching up to stroke his cheek, “what’s brought this on?”

He sighed. “I've been thinking about my parents, and what empty, joyless, meaningless lives they lived, and how easily that could also have been me . . . without you.”

“Ah,” she nodded. “We’ve made a fine life together, but, Teddy, that would never, ever have been you, even without me. Had you never met me, you would not have been content being the country squire. You would have found a way to be of service to others. I know you.” She kissed him, and ushered him inside. “Long flight?”

He nodded. “I'm knackered. Didn't sleep all night. Never could sleep on planes.” He had the fleeting thought that this time, his insomnia had been caused by more than cabin pressure. 

As if reading his mind, his wife tilted her head slightly to the right, a mannerism her eldest daughter had inherited, and asked, “the reminiscing about your parents; what brought that on?”

“Will, I suppose.” Ted sighed. “Did you know that his father was an alcoholic? And a violent one at that.” Maggie shook her head. “The man beat Will from the time he was a small boy . . . a baby, actually . . . his mother too and his siblings.” Margaret winced. “Yes. These were real beatings . . . broken bones and trips to hospital. But apparently, the man had it in for William more than the other children. Although he certainly didn’t spare his wife. It seems that Will graduated from University with highest honors, and the night before, his father beat his mother so that she was too bruised to attend . . . .”

“Ted,” Margaret interrupted, grabbing her husband’s arm. “Are they alright? Will and Mackie . . . you said that he isn't ill . . . but is there something else?”

“They’re fine.”

"The baby?"

“Also fine.”

“You wouldn't lie to me?”

“No. I promise. I won't lie to you.”

“Then, what was so important as to take you across the Atlantic on short notice? What did Will want? To tell you about his childhood?”

“Partly, I think. I think he was worried that if . . . when . . . we found out about his father, we might be concerned that he had violent tendencies too.”

Margaret made a gesture as if she were swatting away an gnat. “Ridiculous! We would never think that. Mackie’s always said that he's the gentlest man she's ever known other than her dad.” Ted smiled. “Mackie knows about his childhood, of course.” Ted nodded. “When did she find out? Did Will say how she reacted?”

“She found out the Thanksgiving before they broke up when he took her to meet his family. She apparently reacted, among other ways, by stopping using birth control.”

“Ah, the miscarriage,” Margaret breathed sadly. 

There it was, the segue into the rest of the conversation, but he simply couldn't tackle it at that moment. Instead, he spoke wearily, “Mags, I need a nap. Then, I'll tell you everything. Come upstairs with me.” He reached for her hand with his free one, and carrying his overnight bag, he led his wife to their bedroom.

Once the door was closed, Ted took her in his arms and kissed her. “You are the most beautiful woman I know.”

“Then you haven't looked at any of our daughters lately.”

He chuckled appreciatively. “I do love you. I've loved you since the first moment I laid eyes on you. I shall never stop loving you.” This time the kiss was more passionate, his hands roaming her body and pressing it against his. When he began to nuzzle her neck, she pulled away, and looked at him slightly askance.

“Teddy, are we going to nap?”

“Eventually, my dear. Eventually.”

When Ted came downstairs after his nap, he found Margaret in the kitchen sipping a cup of tea and slowly consuming a single chocolate biscuit. She smiled when he entered the room, and turned her face up as he bent down to kiss her yet again.

"Perhaps you should travel to Canada more often,” she murmured.

He smiled and looked around the room. “Where’s Em?” he asked. 

“I told her to take the rest of the day to herself. I believe there’s a sale at Marks & Spencer . . . on baby clothes . . . and she’s gone off to make sure that Charlotte McAvoy will look like ‘a proper English baby’ at least some of the time.”

“Then we have the house to ourselves?”

“Yes. Why? Are you planning a repeat performance on the dining room table?” Margaret teased.

Don't I wish, he thought. It was just enough for her to catch the flash of pain in his eyes. 

“Teddy, what's wrong?” she asked, all of the playfulness vanishing from her voice.

“Let's go in the lounge where we can be more comfortable, and I'll tell you.”

“You said that there’s nothing to be concerned over. . . .” Her voice started to rise as she stood up from the table.

“And, there isn't.” Ted wrapped his arm around her shoulders and kissed the side of her head. “It's just . . . Oh, Mags . . . it's . . . it's going to hurt you to hear what I need to say, and I wish to God that there were some way I could make it easier.”

They had reached the lounge by the time he finished, and he steered her to one of the overstuffed sofas. Sitting down beside her, took her hand. He could see that his little preamble had done nothing to quell her rising alarm. He needed to simply cut to the chase before Maggie’s imagination spiraled out of control. 

“One of the things that William told me is that Mackie didn't have a miscarriage.”

Margaret looked at him blankly for a second, and then said flatly, “she aborted the baby. That seems so unlike Mackie, but then . . . “ Margaret shook her head as if the image in her mind was painful. “She was so undone by . . . losing Will, I'm sure nothing she did during those . . . .”

“She didn't have an abortion,” Ted interrupted before she could go on further. Margaret looked at him quizzically, and he plowed on before she could ask. “She carried the baby for 25 weeks . . . .”

“What? Wait. I don't understand.” Margaret rubbed her temple and wrinkled her brow in a manner that both made her look strikingly like an older version of MacKenzie, and conveyed to her husband that she absolutely did understand, and was fighting the knowledge with every fiber of her being.

Ted reached out and took both of her hands in his. “Mags . . . .”

“Twenty-five weeks . . . Teddy, when did she get pregnant?”

“Will thinks it was shortly after they returned home from being with us for the holidays.”

“Then . . . Twenty-five weeks is almost six months . . . that’s . . . that . . . it can't be . . . it . . . .”

Ted took a steadying breath, and cleared his throat in a characteristic mannerism that he did not really notice, but which caused his wife to know that he was about to speak words that he had been mulling over for some time. “Mags, Mackie . . . Mackie was pregnant when she was here in the end of May that year. She was pregnant when she arrived in Kabul on 3rd June.”

“Five, almost six months pregnant? Teddy, she didn't let on?” It pained him to see the hurt in her eyes. “She was so thin . . . my God.” Margaret’s hand rose to cover her mouth, as her eyes filled with tears. “She wouldn't . . . she wouldn't let me hold her, hug her, you know?” He nodded, and squeezed his wife’s hand. “I suppose I now know why. She said that she just couldn't bear it, that she couldn't be that close to anyone without losing her composure, but . . . thin as she was, she had to have been showing by five months.”

“Will told me that Mackie says that she left us early because she realized that she couldn't hide the pregnancy from you if she stayed. She was afraid that she'd shatter if she had to talk about it to you . . . us . . . to anyone, really. Apparently, only her doctor in D.C. knew. Will also thinks that she hid it from us to protect him so that we wouldn't think that he'd abandoned her pregnant. Also, she was still contacting him daily, and hoped that he'd respond and they'd be back together before she had to reveal the pregnancy.” Margaret raised her eyebrows, closed her eyes and shook her head in a gesture that Teddy recognized as her accepting that one of the children had acted in good faith, even if she found his or her thought processes mystifying.

“What happened?” Margaret whispered, “to the baby . . . what happened to the baby?” Ted tried to think of the best and kindest way to answer the question. Obviously, his wife knew that it hadn't survived. “A few days after arriving in Kabul, Mackie went into labor. The baby, a little boy, was born alive . . .” Maggie’s sharp intake of breath stopped him for a second, and he waited to see if she would speak. When she said nothing, he continued, “he didn't live long . . .”

“How long?” Like MacKenzie, he mused, his wife frequently sublimated emotional distress by immersing herself in factual details.

“Will said Mackie thinks it was less than an hour . . . no one knows for sure . . . .”

“Of course they do! Doctors . . . nurses time these things . . . would record the time of birth and the time of death. What hospital was it? We can request the records.” She sounded indignant.

Ted sighed. There was simply no good way to do this. “He wasn't . . . Mackie wasn't taken to hospital . . . until after the baby had died.” Margaret’s eyes grew wide and then narrowed in confusion. “She had the baby in her room at the Intercontinental,” he added hastily before his wife could ask.

"But the hotel doctor . . . “

“She didn't call for the doctor, Mags. She had the baby alone . . . “

“She . . . what do you mean . . . she didn't get help? She went into labor and called no one? There was no one she wanted?” Even as the answer to her questions flashed into Margaret’s mind, the expression on her husband's face confirmed her surmise. “Will,” she said, “Mackie called Will.”

“Repeatedly . . . through the night.”

“He didn't answer, did he?”

“No.”

“She didn't leave messages?”

“He archived them straight away . . . didn't listen to them . . . until recently . . . after Mackie told him about the baby.”

“And he can't forgive himself . . . “

“Not yet.” 

Maggie nodded. “After the baby was born . . . she called for help? You said she went to hospital.”

Ted shook his head. “The maid came in the room and found her . . . them . . . but the baby was already dead.” He simply couldn't bring himself to say that Mackie was unconscious by that time, hemorrhaging and near death herself. “Before . . . before he died, she named him . . . baptized him with some water from a bottle she'd been drinking. You know how Mackie keeps bottles of water about . . . .” He trailed off, seeing from Margaret’s expression that she did not consider their daughter’s water consumption habits a relevant topic for discussion just then. Neither did he, of course, but he was nervous and emotionally drained.

“What,” she whispered, “what . . . was his . . . our grandson’s name?”

“William Duncan.”

In that instant, everything coalesced for Margaret McHale in a blinding wave of grief that was almost physical. She cried out as she was overcome by the trauma, pain, and horror, the agony that her daughter must have experienced, giving birth alone in a strange land, away from everyone she knew, to a child too small and early to be anything other than doomed. Already guilty and heartbroken from Will’s rejection, she had named his son for him. 

Blinded by tears, but with eyes wide and filled by something akin to panic, Margaret jumped to her feet and started for the door. She would have been hard pressed to say where she intended to go. She just knew that she needed to move, to run away. When her husband reached out to stop her, she pulled away from his grasp. 

“No,” she said sharply, “No, don't, Teddy.” But he stood and caught her in his arms. “Let me go! Please, let me go,” she begged. “I think I'm going to be ill.”

“Maggie . . . my darling, stop,” he said soothingly, tightening his hold on her. “I know . . . it's devastating . . . what Mackie went through was horrific.” And left tremendous scars, his mind added. But there would be time enough to talk about post traumatic stress. For now, Ted held his wife while she sobbed, and thought about what to say to give her the perspective he had developed on the airplane flying home. 

When Ted felt Maggie relax slightly, he loosened his grip, and began stroking her hair. “Mags, you’re hearing about this now. But William . . . baby William . . . died six years years ago. I know she and Will will always feel his loss, but it's also true that Mackie’s recovered. Today, she's the woman you talk to and Skype with . . . the woman you saw in New York last summer, laughing, loving, and so very happy in her life.” Margaret pulled away enough to look at him. He gently wiped away the tears on her cheeks and handed her a handkerchief. She could see that there were also tears in his eyes. 

“I'm not trying to take anything away from what happened,” Ted continued, “but Maggie, just think of it,” his voice took on a slightly triumphant note, “after everything Mackie’s been through, she’s the President of ACN, married to the love of her life, and carrying a healthy baby daughter, for whom all indications are positive . . . “

“I just realized why Will was so clear about wanting a girl.”

“What? Why?”

"Never mind." Maggie mustered a bit of a smile and patted Ted on the cheek. “Sorry to interrupt. You were saying . . . “

“Just that we have so much for which to be thankful. According to Will, now that the vomiting is over, Mackie’s feeling fine and actually loves being pregnant. They are making a family. We need to keep our focus on that. It helps. Really, it does.”

"Yes," she agreed. “It does. Everything you say is true.” She leaned up and kissed him. He still looked tired, she thought. This can't have been easy on him either. She had many questions that she wanted answered, and was sure that neither of them had cried their last for the grandson they would never see. But for now, she would make them something to eat, they would relax, and then, she thought with a smile, she’d take her husband back to bed.


	21. Only You

He hadn't meant to pry or, as Mac put it, “spy on me,” but as soon as Will opened MacKenzie’s smartphone log, and saw the three telephone calls, one outgoing and two incoming, he forgot what it was he had picked up her phone to do. The outgoing call to Shivitz had been placed a little before 1 a.m. on the second of his three nights in Canada. The first incoming call had occurred about ten minutes later, and the second, another three minutes after that. 

Why had Mac called Shivitz? The first emotion he felt was worry. Had something been wrong that his wife had called a doctor in the night? She'd seemed fine when he got home though, and she hadn't called Dr. Barrington. Surely, if Mac had not been well, she would have called Catherine before she called Shivitz. Or would she? He felt the tendrils of jealousy wind their way around his heart and squeeze. 

Perhaps it was reliving so many of the abuses of his childhood with the Ambassador or being away from MacKenzie for the last few days (their passionate reunion not withstanding), but by the time Mac emerged from the steamy bathroom, wrapped in her blue cashmere robe, freshly showered, with her damp hair wrapped in a towel, his emotions were primed for disaster. He tried to get her to tell him about the calls with a casual inquiry as to whether everything had been alright while he was away, but when she brushed off the question with an “everything’s been just fine,” he began to interrogate her. 

She didn't take kindly to his questioning or to the eventual disclosure of his “snooping about” on her phone. Her antagonism mixed with his guilt about invading her privacy and made him defensive and belligerent. Finally, he all but accused her of a tryst with Shivitz behind his back. Her eyes widened in shock and disbelief. Then, she took two steps toward him and slammed her upper arms and fisted hands against his chest so hard that he took an involuntary step backwards from the blow. The tie of her robe fell away from the motion, and the soft blue folds of cashmere parted to reveal the bulge of her naked belly, a bulge that just a few hours before, he had been kissing and caressing. Now, Mac grabbed the ends of the tie and looping them together, pulled the knot with sufficient force not only to close the robe, but also to make Charlie take notice and kick back.

“Jesus Christ! Billy! I'm your wife. I'm seven months pregnant with our child, and you think that you’d go away for two days and I’d call up Danny in the middle of the night and what? . . . invite him over for a fuck!” 

Just as quickly as her anger flared, it turned to sorrow, and Will watched pain and defeat claim his wife’s face as she lowered it into her hands. “Oh God,” he heard her say, “this will never end. You’ll never really trust me.” She looked up at him. “I don't think you’ll ever understand what happened with Brian, or what you mean to me . . . that there is . . . has always been . . . only you.” Tears came to her eyes as she spoke. “Billy, in the six years we were apart, I slept with . . . or tried to . . . with exactly two men. One was Monk, who was sweet and giving and mature enough to understand when I couldn't go through with it, and the other was Wade Campbell, who was either throughly taken in by my acting prowess, or simply chose to ignore the evidence that the experience left me dead and cold and indescribably lonely.” She gave him a rueful half-smile. “So, if that’s as successful as I could be when you were making it very clear that you never wanted to see me again, or had no intention of ever touching me again . . . .” MacKenzie never finished the thought because Will reached out, brought her to him, enveloped her with his body and pressed his mouth to hers. 

“I’m sorry. I am. I do trust you, Kenz, I do trust you,” he breathed into her hair when they broke from the kiss. “You are my best friend . . . my most trusted partner . . . God, I trust you with my life . . . I do . . . Kenz, you are my life.”

“I know. I know, Billy”

“I don't know what’s the matter with me. I don't know why I'm doing . . . saying . . . why I said what I said.” He shook his head in genuine confusion, and Mac thought of a fragment of one of her many conversation with Jack Habib. “You’re going to fight John McAvoy every day for the rest of your life. You took that on when you let Will put a ring on your finger,” the young doctor had said. Mac reached up and caressed her husband’s cheek, and thought about her response which had been, “oh, no . . . I took it on much, much longer ago than that.”

“I got scared, Kenz, when I saw that you’d called Shivitz so late . . . and then when you said nothing had happened . . . that everything had been fine . . . I just . . . I don't know . . . .”

“That was wrong of me. I should have told you straight away what happened. I shouldn't have lied.”

“You lied because you thought that I'd be jealous of Danny . . . of your calling to talk to Danny instead of me?” Although she could see that he was struggling manfully to keep his emotions in check, the idea that Mac would ever want to talk to someone else more than she wanted to talk to him was producing distress that simply radiated from his body. 

"Oh, no, Billy!" She kissed him this time. “I called Danny because I needed a doctor, not a partner.”

Now, his alarm spiked. She's alright. He reminded himself. She's here with me, and she’s . . . they’re . . . okay. He ran it through his head like a calming mantra.

"I think,” she was saying, “that I would have told you sooner if it hadn't had to do with something that makes me feel so . . . .“ She struggled for the word, a rare occurrence in the world of MacKenzie McHale. “Feel so stupid and weak . . . embarrassed, really . . . .” She paused again. 

“What’s that?” 

“Having nightmares . . . having . . . asthma.” He could see that she could barely make herself say the word.

“And, also . . . well, I couldn't imagine how I could call you and not get Daddy involved.” She could see from the look on his face that this had never occurred to him. Knowing the lengths that Mac had always gone not to let her parents know about any sort of health issue was just the oomph needed to completely right the ship. Mac looked into his eyes and saw that her Billy was firmly in control at last. 

“Tell me what happened,” he said, stroking her cheek.

"I had a nightmare.”

“Leona again?”

“No. I’m hopeful that’s stopped now that I’ve told her. We’ve started talking about about the dreams . . . we had dinner while you were gone. Will, she actually opened up to me, and talked about herself and Charlie when Reese was conceived.” Mac’s face lit up with the memory of the conversation with Leona. “I'll tell you about some of it another time.” Then, her face fell, and she sighed deeply. “And, so,” she began again, trying hard to insert a bit of levity into her voice, “with Leona out of the way, it appears we’re back to Nina.”

He gave the little wince he always did when the gossip columnist’s name was mentioned. “Tell me about it.”

"I will. Let me put on some clothes first and make us some herbal tea. Then, I'll tell you everything that happened.”

They sat in the living room, she with her tea, he with a cup of coffee, and she told him everything – the dream turning to a nightmare, awakening unable to breathe, using the rescue inhaler, not feeling Charlotte move and panicking.

“Danny says she was probably asleep,” Mac gave a half-giggle and shrugged an embarrassed little shrug, “they start to have sleep patterns in the last trimester . . . and my distress just wasn't enough to wake her up.”

“Oh, Kenz,” he said, putting down his coffee mug, and removing the tea cup from her hands. “I wish I'd been here with you. I should have been here with you.” He pulled her onto his lap and she curled against his chest. “I'm glad you called Shivitz. Really. I am.”

Mac explained about fighting with Danny over his instruction to call 911 and go to the Beth Israel ER. “I thought you’d completely freak if I called you from hospital, not to mention I couldn't imagine you learning I that I was having trouble breathing and Charlie wasn't moving, and then, still being able to go on with Daddy as if nothing were wrong . . . .”

“I'd have come home . . . .”

“Yes. There was that too.” MacKenzie sighed. “I don't know . . . I just feel so stupid when I get one of those attacks . . . I hate using the damned inhaler in front of people . . . I hate being unable to breath properly . . . my first instinct is to hide it . . . especially if it's brought on by emotions . . . I should be able to get upset without . . . .”

“Mac, your lungs are hyper-responsive to a variety of irritants, including stress. It's a physiological condition not a moral weakness.” He smiled. “It's not like failing to keep a stiff upper lip or keep calm and carry on in a crisis,” Will teased.

Mac tried to smile, but couldn't keep her lips from trembling or her eyes from filling with tears. It wasn't that she was sad, more touched by his giving her permission to be flawed and weak. Damned hormones, she thought, and tried gamely to smile. “I know . . . I just . . . .”

Oh, my darling . . . . “. Will put his hands on each side of her face and kissed her forehead. “Why do you think you need to be so strong?”

“Because . . . for so long . . . I didn't have you.” The last thing she intended was to do or say something that would put anything more on him to add to the already crushing burden of guilt she knew he was carrying. The words, however, just slipped out before she could censor them. And, with them came tears she found herself powerless to hold back.

“You have me now, Kenz, now and for as long as I live, and I intend to live a very long time. I'm yours.” 

He held and rocked her while the tears ran their course. So much damage, Will thought, I've done so much damage. Why hadn't he listened? Why hadn't he read her messages, returned to Washington in time, or gone to Surrey and brought her home? Even if he'd been too late for that, if he’d listened, he could have flown to Kabul and taken her from the hospital . . . helped her heal. If he had listened, even that late, there would have been no Iraq, no knife wound. Why? Why hadn't he played the messages? Why hadn't he read the emails? Where once he'd had a thousand satisfying justifications for his refusal to contemplate her apologies, now there were no answers to the questions he endlessly posed to himself. 

He flashed on a scene from a few weeks back . . . six-year-old Ned, Charlie Skinner’s grandson, on one of his frequent sleepovers at their apartment, fresh from the shower in his Spider-Man pajamas, was standing beside a seated MacKenzie, while she combed his damp hair into place. It was, Will reflected, the sight of Ned’s small hand resting on Mac’s knee that had provoked the wave of regret and grief that had swamped him, causing him to turn away quickly before she could see the pain and guilt on his face. But she had seen it, and had ached for him, remembering when she could not even be near a child without suffering a major depressive episode, when she had fortified herself with the Zoloft she rarely took just to be around Tessa, her brother’s daughter.

Now she sat up clumsily because of their child growing within her, and reaching for a tissue, wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “I don't know what’s come over me,” she said. “I don't even feel sad. Really, Billy, I don't. Actually, it's feeling loved that seems to be reducing me to a sodden puddle today.” She took a deep breath and gave him her best smile. He smiled back when he realized that it was a genuine smile and not the pseudo-happy expression that she had perfected during her first two years at ACN to deal with his punishing her.

“Anyway,” Mac continued, settling back down against his chest. “Danny got Jon Fischer to make a house call and check on me, and then . . .” she paused, just a beat, “Danny showed up here, and insisted that I go home with him.”

Will pulled her up so that he could look into her face. “MacKenzie, how bad was this attack?”

“Not that bad. Really. I'd have been fine staying here. But apparently, Riv . . . Rivka . . . that’s Danny’s wife . . . insisted that I shouldn't be alone and sent him to fetch me. She’s great, Will. I like her enormously, and I know you’re going to get on with her famously as well.”

Mac answered all of his questions about the attack, Fischer’s assessment, her resistance to adjusting any of her asthma medications, and Fischer’s eventual agreement to leave things as they were. Then, they decided to let it all go for a while and simply enjoy being back together on a day they did not have to go to the studio. Will cooked, and after eating, they curled up, interlocking their legs, and read the paper. Finally, as the afternoon sun began to sink, Mac announced that she would like to go for a long walk in the park. 

MacKenzie McHale would have stayed fit during her pregnancy if only because she was her mother’s daughter, but the adhesions from the botched field repair of the knife wound made it mandatory. “If only you’d planned this pregnancy,” Catherine Barrington had sighed, when Mac and Will sat before her after the first blinding pains in her abdomen had sent them, terrified, to the Emergency Room. “We could have put you under before you conceived, and broken up the scar tissue with a laser. You’d have been sore and swollen for a couple for weeks but . . . “ She sighed. “Can't do that now.”

“Well,” Mac said, shooting a rueful smile in Will’s direction, “advance planning hasn't exactly been our strong suit.” He took her hand and brought her knuckles to his lip in one of those gestures that always made Catherine a little weak at the knees. “So,” Mac looked back at the doctor, “what now?”

“The baby will push on the adhesions as they compete for space in your tummy.”

“Could they . . . the adhesions . . . keep the baby from growing?” Mac had asked, suddenly frightened again.

“Nope. All the money’s on little McAvoy in there. The adhesions don't stand a chance. But we need to figure out the best way for you to deal with the pain . . . .”

“Not drugs!” Mac interrupted.

“No,” Catherine agreed, “that would be a last resort.”

And so, they used a combination of aerobic exercise, strength training, massage, and just plain endurance when there was nothing for it but Will’s holding her while she cried through the agony. Naturally, Will blamed himself, and she quickly learned that nothing she could say would remove the idea Jim had planted that the stabbing wouldn't have happened if the anniversary of William’s birth had not knocked her PTSD out of remission. Eventually, she gave in and agreed, more or less, with the two of them. 

“You’re telling me that you were alright . . . we’re here with an eye-witness, and you are saying that you were alright when you decided to risk attending the protest in Islamabad?” Will had asked her that question one evening at Hang Chews when the subject had been impossible to ignore. Will and Jim had both had a couple of drinks, and she’d had an eye-popping, grasp the bar rail for dear life, scream-like-a-girl, adhesion rupture. Will had caught her, dropped to the floor and cradled her when her knees had buckled from the pain. Most of the News Night crowd had simply stared at them in silence. Only, Jim had hunkered down and rubbed her back while Mac buried her face against Will and tried to breathe through the pain.

Afterwards, the three of them had talked for the first time together about the riot in Islamabad and the stabbing. 

“Seriously, Mac? You want me to believe that in June, 2009, you were alright?” Despite the alcohol loosening his tongue, Will’s intonation was pure News Night anchor, and it had made Mac respond honestly.

“Alright? Am I telling you I was alright?” Mac heard her voice rising with more emotion than she wanted to show. And, then, emotion was all she could show. “Define alright. Alright?” She repeated softly. “Billy, I wasn't alright from the moment that I told you about Brian until the instant you pulled me into that alcove beside the news desk and started fumbling with the Tiffany’s box.” Tears glistened in her eyes but didn't fall. She reached up and caressed his chin. “No. No, I wasn't alright. Jim’s correct. I was the walking dead, emotionally flat, a bereft zombie. That is, of course, when I wasn’t crying uncontrollably. But Billy, that didn't make it inevitable that I would be stabbed. That was a crime of opportunity. Someone wanted to get a Western journalist. There were many other Westerners in that square. I was the lucky one, that’s all.” 

When Mac began her exercise routine, Will joined in. They worked out together in the AWM gym, and Will had started running with her. He’d thanked God that he'd had the time in jail to get into some semblance of physical condition for this pregnancy. It took a few months, but he was pleased to find that the effects of his years of smoking seemed to wear off rather quickly, and he could match her stride for stride. Nonetheless, he was relieved when Mac’s girth and the weight of her breasts made her finally switch from jogging to power walking. She was almost six months along when she had to cut that back to less than a 4.5 mile an hour pace, one that she called slow and he labeled, “reasonable.” Now, at nearly eight months, they walked at a moderate pace that she called “strolling,” but had to agree, was advantageous in that they could hold hands, and actually converse without panting.

Will was enjoying their walk this evening. The day was crisp but not yet really cold, and there were still enough trees in the park the had not lost their leaves to create a palette of Fall colors, red, orange and brown.

“Did you see your parents being affectionate with one another . . . when you were a little girl?” Will asked suddenly, as they passed an elderly couple snuggling on a park bench.

"Lord, yes," Mac chuckled. “Affectionate and more. They were . . . are . . . so into each other. I'm sure we each walked in on them ‘doing the deed’ at least once, some of us more than once. Daddy likes to grab Mummy’s ass when he thinks no one is looking.” She seemed to ponder that for a moment. “He's more of an ass man than a leg man, I think.”

They stopped walking and Mac turned and fit herself against Will who was being buffeted by a sharper late Fall wind that had unexpectedly come up. He lowered his hand and caressed the outside of a well-muscled, running tight clad thigh. Will had been flabbergasted to learn that a variety of clothing lines offered maternity exercise wear. “He doesn't know what he's missing,” he whispered in Mac’s ear, before bending his head and covering her lips with his mouth.

“Do you think . . . I mean . . . .” He started to ask when they came up for air, and then, trailed off slightly embarrassed by his own question. Mac knew exactly what he meant.

“You don't think I'm letting you off the hook when you’re seventy-four, do you, big guy? I fully expect you to continue to fulfill your connubial responsibilities.” She kissed him again.

Will re-engaged his brain, momentarily confused by arousal, but not before he'd said, “wha . . . what?” 

“Well, if you don't like the idea,” she continued, giving him the crinkly-eyed smile that he adored, “you should have thought about it before you married a beautiful, young, lusty, sexy wife. 

"What are you talking about?" Will asked, still a little confused.

“What you were talking about. Daddy . . . “ she replied. “He and Mum weren't just affectionate when I was a child.” She smiled sweetly at her husband. “I'm saying that I imagine that he did much the same thing when he got home that you did.” She paused and gave a shrug. “I don't think about it particularly . . . after all, they are my parents . . . but, well, as I've gotten older, it's just been more apparent that they still desire each other. I'm quite sure that they haven't given up sex . . . especially, since I can't imagine giving it up myself when I reach their ages.”

“Yeah, me either,” Will said fervently. They kissed again, neither of them noticing the jogger who had come upon them, and pulled out his cell phone to take a picture when he realized they were the couple who had just been on the cover of People Magazine. The photo appeared in the next issue, captioned, “Three McAvoy’s in the Park,” and featured Will’s hand resting protectively on Mac’s very apparent belly, as she leaned up to kiss him. Mac pretended to mind, but in reality, liked the picture enough to make a copy with her own phone.

“I want you to meet Rivka,” Mac said as they walked back to their apartment.

“Okay.”

“When we get home, I'm going to look at our calendars and figure out a time that will work to invite them out for dinner, alright?”

“Sure,” Will replied, sounding a little less than convinced that striking up a friendship with Dan Shivitz and his wife was a good idea. Mac decided to ignore the reservation that she heard in her husband's voice. 

As it turned out, Will and Mac travelled to Westchester to meet Dan and Rivka and go to a kosher restaurant near their home, since cutting out the Shivitz’s travel time, meant that they could make the most of the hours Riv could comfortably be away from Avi. As Mac predicted, Will did like Rivka, with her direct manner and piercing blue eyes. The food at the restaurant was good. The only drawback was the noise level that made it difficult for them to carry on a four-way conversation. As a result, Mac talked mostly to Danny, while Will conversed with Rivka. 

Although he tried, Will found it difficult at times to concentrate on anything except watching MacKenzie interact with Danny. They seemed so easy and relaxed with one another, as if they had been friends for years instead of people who had spent no more than six weeks together, six years before.

“It bothers you,” Rivka observed, startling Will out of his reverie. 

“What? Who?” he asked like a man shaken awake from a deep sleep.

“Them,” Rivka Shivitz said, gesturing with her fork in the direction of her husband and Will’s wife. 

Embarrassed at being caught out, Will sputtered a denial. Rivka only smiled at him.

“It's okay,” she said. “They share a connection . . . a past . . . that nothing can take away.”

“I guess they’ll always have Kabul.” It was a feeble attempt at humor, a play on the famous line from “Casablanca,” and Will kicked himself as soon as it was out of his mouth. Nothing about Kabul was a joking matter.

Rivka nodded. “In a way . . . . Daniel literally brought MacKenzie back from the dead,” Rivka said, watching Mac laugh at something Danny said, completely oblivious to the fact that Will’s and Rivka’s conversation had turned serious. “He wouldn't stop trying to resuscitate her when the other doctors were ready to pronounce her dead.” She saw the color drain from Will’s face. “Heady stuff for a young man still dealing with the fact that his father saw his becoming a doctor as a betrayal of his duty to God. We, Jews, can be very superstitious and fatalistic, and he believes that he was intended to be in that ER that day. 

“She was beautiful . . . still is . . . “ Rivka continued, “and she had sustained a tragic loss, and Daniel fell in love with her.” Rivka smiled at Will. “But luckily for me, she was already married to someone else. She never felt about him the way he did about her.” Rivka looked directly into Will’s eyes, and said, “you have nothing to worry about. MacKenzie loves you. I can see it every time she looks at you. And, she's told me. There’s only you in her life. It’s always been that way.”

He winced slightly at the thought that his insecurities were sufficiently transparent to provoke this kind of response. But Rivka was so guileless, it was impossible to be defensive. “I know,” he said, “I do know. 

“I know that Mac wants me to like Danny,” Will continued, “for us to be friends. I know that everything I have that’s good in my life, I owe to him, and what he did for her from the moment she arrived at that hospital in Kabul until the day she left to return to the states. I know . . . I’m sure . . . he's a great guy . . . .” Will paused, unconsciously scrubbing his hands over his face. The unspoken “but” was deafening. “I just can't seem to forgive him.”

It wasn't what Will had expected himself to say. It wasn't at all what he had meant to say. He saw Rivka flinch involuntarily, saw her eyes become clouded for a second as she prepared to hear that her husband had lied to her about the nature of his relationship with MacKenzie years ago. Will realized suddenly and with blinding clarity, that he wasn't in this alone, that it wasn't a triad. There were four people in this relationship, five, if you counted Avi, six, including Charlotte. 

“I didn't . . . I mean, I know that he was wonderful with her . . . that he never took advantage of her vulnerability. I believe her completely. It's just that . . . he was there.” Will dropped his head and his voice. “When I wasn't. He held . . . my son’s body . . . he saw her with . . . he was there when she said good-bye to William.” Will paused again, and then whispered, “it’s not Danny . . . it's myself that I can't forgive.”

Rivka covered Will’s hand with her own and squeezed. “It will come. Time. And, being a father to your little girl. Give yourself time, Will.”


	22. Spare the Rod

Three Years Before

The knock jolted her. The sound of someone’s knuckles connecting with the glass of her office door at ACN was still unfamiliar and jarring. Tents and temporary military structures in the desert aren't glass. MacKenzie looked up, startled, her reading specs perched on the end of her nose. She nodded, as the door moved and a head appeared.

“Got a minute, Mac?” 

“For you, Jim, always.” Jim Harper’s boyish face glowed in the combination of pleasure and embarrassment that her romantic teasing inevitably produced. “Seriously, though,” she asked, “what’s up?”

“You know the opposition research that you’ve had us doing on Will?” He didn't give her time to answer. “Mac, did you know that in 1970, his father pled guilty to sixteen counts of assault, battery, spousal and child abuse?” Again, he plowed on before she had a chance to answer. “He . . . Will’s father . . . did like six months of a two year jail sentence.”

Merciful Christ! MacKenzie berated herself for not remembering this, and realizing that if they dug around in Will’s past, it was only a matter of time before someone stumbled on his father’s criminal record. She took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Could Will hate her more than he already did, she wondered. Well, she imagined she would get to find out when he learned that she was the instrumentality of everyone in the newsroom learning the thing he would just as soon keep as secret as the reason for their breakup. She sighed deeply.

“Yes. I knew.”

“You can still get the indictment. It's stored on microfiche. It says that he . . . “. Jim looked down at the sheet of paper in his hand. “John McAvoy . . . that’s Will’s dad’s name . . . beat Will repeatedly for years . . . broke his arm when he was six . . . . My God, Mac, it says that Will was hospitalized with a concussion once because . . . .”

“I know.” Mac’s words were barely more than a whisper. “Who . . . who did the research . . . who found this?” Ordinarily, Mac would have bounded out of her office to give the person a pat on the back. This was first-class investigative reporting. Now, she sat frozen into place.

“Margaret Jordan,” Jim replied, saying her full name on the off-chance that Mac wouldn't know whom he was talking about if he'd just said, “Maggie.”

“Who else knows?” 

“I'm pretty sure, just Maggie and me. I don't think that she’s told anyone . . . else. ” He dipped his chin in a characteristically Jim mannerism. “She was . . . you know . . . kind of shaken up. She said that when she first started looking at it, she didn't think that the John McAvoy who hit his wife and kids could be the one who was Will’s father. But then, she found a newspaper account and there was this picture. He was the complaining witness against his father.” Jim handed the piece of paper he was holding to MacKenzie. It was an article about John McAvoy’s arrest.

“Oh, Billy,” she breathed in a barely audible whisper, gently touching the cheek of the ten-year-old face that stared out at her from the copy of the front page of the Lincoln Evening Journal. It was a school picture, she noted, and the poor resolution told her that it had been copied from his middle school yearbook rather than provided by the family. 

“Ask Maggie to come in here, would you?”

“Sure.” Jim darted out the door. A few moments later he returned with Maggie in tow. 

MacKenzie agreed with Jim’s assessment that Maggie had been rocked to discover that Will had been raised by a belligerent alcoholic with violent tendencies. Maggie seemed visibly relieved to hear Mac say that this particular part of Will’s history, although obviously accessible in the public record, was not something that deserved to be widely known. As upset as Mac was at the thought of Will’s learning about Maggie’s discovery, she was tickled by the fact that neither Maggie nor Jim could hide their pleasure when Mac complimented her on her burgeoning investigative skills. Mac took possession of all of the paperwork Maggie had accumulated on the subject and the three of them declared the issue closed.

It took two sleepless nights for MacKenzie McHale to decide that she needed to tell Will that Maggie and Jim knew about his childhood. 

She opened his office door without knocking, and pushed half of her body through. “Billy.” She hadn't meant to say it. The name had simply emerged from her lips, from her heart, carrying with it, all that she felt, dreamed of and remembered. 

His head jerked up, and something flashed in his eyes that was gone too quickly for Mac to be certain of what she saw. It was replaced with the ice blue gaze of almost expressionless hostility that closed her throat, put steel bands around her lungs, and made her question whether Charlie Skinner was simply a foolish old romantic who didn't know Will at all.

What was she trying to pull? He wasn't “Billy.” He had never been Billy. Well, except for a few enchanted months . . . years . . . yes, years . . . years when he had been fool enough to think that what he had with her . . . thought he had with her . . . would or could last a lifetime. His face hardened against the longing . . . against his own damn stupidity that the longing was still there . . . against Charlie, who was inflicting this on him, and against her, most especially against MacKenzie, who obviously had no idea the extent of his pain if she thought that she could just say she was sorry and wipe away the fact that she had gone with him to Nebraska and then come back to D.C. and fucked Brian Brenner. It was as though she had crawled out of the deepest recesses of his soul and into Brenner’s bed. The image of her together with Brenner jumped into his mind, and it was all he could do not to bring his hands up to his face and rub violently at his eyes.

“What do you want?” he asked tersely. For a moment she seemed taken aback by the question, but then she shook her head slightly, and told him.

Will let his anger flare at her, even though he knew that it wasn't her fault, that the arrest records were, as she’d stated, a matter of public record. But he acted as though the opposition research was something she was doing maliciously, rather than something any good EP (or friend) would do to protect him from Leona Lansing’s apparent campaign to get him to toe the line or be banished. 

She took it all. Stood there as she always did, damn her, and absorbed every angry word, every sneer, every emotional blow he could aim at her. Finally, when his rage was mostly spent, she again whispered, “I'm sorry, Will,” and disappeared.

He knew that he had been unfair, that he had been punishing her for Brenner, not for Maggie’s having inadvertently stumbled onto his father’s arrest. He wanted to go after her. Christ, he wanted her so badly his gut ached, and he hated himself for it. His hands shook as he lit another cigarette and turned back to drafting some copy for a story on Congressional disfunction that he was going to pitch to Charlie. He tried not to think about the fact that it was a story that would further irritate Mrs. Lansing, or that it was a story that Mac had been urging him to cover.

Alone in her office, MacKenzie tried to get her breathing under control. It was her own fault, she kept telling herself. She had brought this on herself by taking Brian’s calls, by letting herself think that he'd changed and that she owed him something . . . loyalty . . . a second chance. She closed her eyes and tried to push the pain away. Everything she wanted . . . everything she could have had . . . was less than a hundred steps away . . . hating her.

 

The Present

“What’s that?” Will’s voice jolted MacKenzie out of her thoughts. She straightened up from where she'd been slightly hunched over a cardboard box, and let the paper she had been holding flutter back down into the container. She smiled as her husband entered her office, and began rubbing her aching back with both hands, feeling the weight of her unborn child resting on her thighs. 

“Oh, just the last of the boxes I brought up here. I decided to finally finish unpacking. Maybe the whole third-trimester ‘nesting’ thing you read about is happening to me. Anyway, I have this uncontrollable urge to get things squared away and spit spot. I . . . I missed the show tonight, by the way, how did it go?"

"It was fine." Will walked across her office, and kissing the top of her head, sat down beside and slightly behind her on the sofa. Looking into the box, he exclaimed, “whoa! Where did you get that?” Before she could react, he reached in and grabbed up the photocopy of the newspaper account of his father’s arrest. 

“From Maggie,” Mac replied. “Years ago,” she hastily added when she saw confusion cloud Will’s eyes. “Back when we were trying to find everything that Nina or Page Six might be able to dredge up for Leona to use against you.” It all sounded so crazy now that “Grandma Lee” would do anything to hurt Will. “You remember.” 

Yes, of course, he remembered. How could he forget? He had abused Mac verbally for days, and then sunk into a major bout of depression and insomnia, reliving . . . he snorted out a breath at his folly . . . reliving a wholly imagined betrayal. 

Will dropped the piece of paper back into the box, and lowered his head to his wife’s shoulder, resting his forehead in the nape where her shoulder flowed into her neck. It was one of his favorite places to kiss. “I was horrible to you . . . when you told me that the opposition research had uncovered my father’s arrest.”

“I can understand your being upset . . . embarrassed . . . .”

“No,” he interrupted. “There’s no excuse. I was . . . It was more than wanting to cover up my past.” He took a deep breath and continued. “I thought . . . When I thought you had gone to Brian after we got back from Nebraska . . . after Thanksgiving . . . I thought that it was because you’d learned about . . . my father . . . . “

Billy . . . I . . . .”

“Let me finish. I thought that it had scared you . . . that after you found out what he was like . . . what I'd come from . . . that you were afraid . . . of me . . . afraid I was like him.”

Mac didn't speak this time. She simply reached up and put her hand against her husband’s cheek.

"I hated myself . . . for frightening you . . . and for trusting you with my secret. But I needed to hate you more.” He paused, and wrapped his arms tighter around her, resting his right hand on her belly. Then, he began to rub in a nervous, unconscious gesture as he spoke. “I felt like I had let you into my soul, I guess, and you had run from what you'd seen . . . straight to Brenner’s bed. Part of me thought that it was a normal reaction . . . “ He gave a bitter sounding laugh.

This time she did speak. “Oh, God, Billy. I wish I could have gotten through to you. Sometimes I think that maybe if I'd been able to stay calm . . . controlled the tears and hysterics . . . I would have been able to make you see . . . I could have made you at least understand that my . . . whatever . . . my time with Brian had been two years before I told you about it. At least, you wouldn't have thought that I could have . . . that we could have been the way we were by then, and I could have . . . had anything to do with Brian.”

“It wasn't your fault, Kenz. I should have know that . . . God, sometimes I wonder if I didn't know that you hadn't spent two years with me and then cheated . . . I mean, you’re the least duplicitous person I’ve ever known, as Jack constantly reminds me. I think I was just . . . that I always expect . . . expected . . . betrayal. I nursed that imagined betrayal . . . for the years you were away . . . and I punished you for it when you came back. The hardest times were when we'd be working and it would recede and I'd feel happy . . . like we were a unit again . . . and then something would happen or I'd just remind myself, and it would all come roaring back.. Having Maggie find the arrest . . . and, when you came in to tell me, you called me, Billy . . . remember?”

“I'm pretty sure I'd slipped and called you Billy before.”

“Not like that. You said it . . . like you used to . . . you said it like you still loved me."

"I did still love you."

"It brought it all up again . . . all the pain, and I wanted to hurt you . . . I told myself that you didn't understand what I'd gone through . . . that I needed to hurt you so you’d know how it felt. I'm sorry . . . I'm so sorry, Kenz.”

They sat in silence for a long time, with Will just rubbing and rubbing. Finally, Charlie began to react to the pressure of Will’s hand. 

“Your daughter likes your touch,” Mac murmured, relaxing against him, letting him take her weight. After another moment, she said, “your wife likes your touch, too. Let’s go home.”

Home. His daughter. His wife. MacKenzie . . . his MacKenzie . . . was his wife. He . . . they . . . had made a child. He thought of home, the warm, slightly cluttered apartment, with the yellow nursery that was still a work in progress, and felt his spirits lift. Everywhere he turned in his life, MacKenzie was in evidence. Sometimes he could barely remember the man who had lived, or at least, existed, high above Manhattan in a sterile, glass and chrome mausoleum with its bank of video monitors. 

“Billy,” Mac broke the silence. “I know we both have a lot of regrets and guilts, but we have the opportunity . . . .” He thought she was going to say something about being happy, but to his surprise, she said, “to make a mistake that will be so catastrophic that all of our past fuck-ups will pale in comparison.”

He sat up and pulled her around so that he could look into her eyes. She looked serious, and yet, calm and contented. He raised his brows in a questioning gesture, and she spoke again. “If we let our feelings about anything that happened before . . . anything we did to each other . . . contaminate one instant of Charlie’s life,” she shook her head slightly as if to dispel an evil spirit, “we will be criminally negligent.”

Will nodded solemnly, and put his hands on her shoulders. “I won't let you down. I won't let either of you down.”

“I know.”

“That statement,” he began, “about Charlie’s life, it sounded a lot like something the Ambassador would say.”

Mac’s lips twisted into a smile, as she wondered if people knew how many of the incisive, game-changing observations for which Ted McHale was famous in diplomatic circles had actually originated with her mother.

 

Three Hours Earlier

Mac's smartphone vibrated on her desk, the signal that a text message was coming in. It was from Margaret McHale. “Mackie, darling, r u available to Skype?”

Mac felt her pulse jump, her throat tighten and her breath quicken. Ordinarily, that would not be her reaction to anticipating a conversation with her mother. But this was different. This would be the first time she had faced her mother with all of her sins and failings laid bare . . . the first time since her father had returned from Canada and told his wife the truth about how their daughter's first pregnancy had ended.

“Love to” Mac hastily typed her reply. “Give me 20 and I'll be sorted.”

Eighteen minutes later, MacKenzie rose from her desk and walked to her office door. "Millie,” she called, putting her head outside the door and turning in the direction of the woman that she still thought of as “Charlie’s Admin.” “Millie, I'm going to close my door and take a Skype call from my mother. Would you mind terribly staying for a little while longer so that you can hold my calls and keep the wolves and hounds at bay?”

Millie smiled. “Not a problem. How about the wolf you’re married to? Does the directive include Will?”

Mac smiled back. "He is rather wolf-like, isn't he? It’s the blue eyes, I suppose.” Mac glanced at her watch. “I doubt that he'll be up. He and Jim should be deep into their last minute rundown by now, but, no, it doesn't apply to Will.”

“Alright.” Millie’s eyes twinkled. “I assume it applies to hyenas though.”

Mac chortled. “Most definitely to hyenas, although I think ours is still on the West Coast.” Mac’s desktop computer made a ringing sound. “Ops! Got to go. Thanks, awfully, Millie. As soon as I'm off, you can go on home.”

When Mac thought that her face was sufficiently composed, she clicked the button to connect the call and smiled into the tiny fisheye that sat on top of her monitor. “Hi, Mummy.”

"Mackie, my love! You’re looking splendid!" And she was, Margaret thought. “Positively splendid.”

“I'm feeling pretty splendid, actually . . . my back muscles get tired and strained by the end of the day,” Mac replied, unconsciously moving a hand to rub them, “but other than that, most days I'm just fine.” She gave a half laugh, half giggle. “I think Will’s getting a little horrified at the full extent of my girth, but as long as my legs remain unaffected, that's what he really cares about . . . and, of course, my growing cleavage is getting high marks.”

Now it was Margaret’s turn to laugh. “Yes, enjoy it while you can. In my experience, it does return to normal when you’re done breastfeeding. Sorry you had to inherit my bosom, Mackie, dear. Not one of my best features.” She paused and studied her daughter’s face again. There was strain evident around Mackie’s eyes, but she did indeed look like the last months of the pregnancy were being kind to her. “Your father said that Will told him in Canada, that now that the nausea and the pain from the adhesions are past, you really do love being pregnant.”

Canada. The elephant in the room sat up and took notice. MacKenzie felt her face freeze in the forced smile she had perfected when she'd arrived at News Night to hide the fact that Will’s anger and actions had gutted her. Inside, she felt shame rising. Her mother knew . . . knew how spectacularly she had failed as a mother herself. It was somehow worse than she had imagined it would be, this shared knowledge. Into the awkward silence, Mac unconsciously breathed the words, “oh, God,” and was trying desperately to think of something more to say when her mother spoke.

“Oh, Mackie . . . my darling girl. I'm so sorry. I should have called you days ago . . . as soon as your father told me what happened . . . in Afghanistan. To be honest, I . . . I needed some time to deal with my guilt before I could face you . . . .”

“Your guilt,” Mac repeated incredulously, “you have nothing about which to feel guilty, Mum . . . You . . .”

“MacKenzie,” Margaret McHale interrupted, “you are far too intelligent and much too pregnant to believe that.” When Mac said nothing, her mother went on in a gentler tone. “Mackie, I knew that something was terribly, horribly wrong when you were here . . . something beyond just having Will angry and hurt . . . and I did nothing . . . for a lot of reasons . . . but I did nothing just the same.”

“Mum, I was a grown woman, remember?”

Margaret laughed. “I can't wait to hear your little Charlotte say that to you.” She paused and stared into the camera, wishing desperately that they could be having this conversation in person, where she could hold her little girl tightly, and kiss away the tension that still clouded MacKenzie’s eyes. “Mackie, you are my baby . . . my first baby . . . that never changes, as you will no doubt see. And, I told myself back then that you were a grown woman when I stood aside and di . . .” Margaret caught herself, knowing full well not to finish with “didn't stop you,” not to any of her brood, but especially not to MacKenzie. “. . . didn't make a fuss over your departing for Afghanistan.” 

"Mum, really, I was determined to go . . . there’s nothing you could have done to prevent it,” Mac replied, even as she mentally reassessed the truth of that statement. Margaret Alexandra Caroline Morgan McHale with all of the stops pulled out was a formidable force of nature. 

“Well, darling, we’ll never know, will we? And, I'm trying not to dwell on it. I don't think I . . . suspected a pregnancy, but I certainly knew that you were physically unwell, and I didn't call in a Doctor . . . I just told myself that you’d get it sorted, and get healthy again. I convinced myself that going back to work was better for you than sitting around Surrey. You wouldn't ride. Walking tired you. I should have guessed it was more than a broken heart. But I . . . . It was foolish and cowardly of me . . . .”

“Cowardly?”

Margaret sighed. “I didn't want to get into it with your father, anymore . . . and I told myself that you would benefit from being away from him.” 

Margaret gave the same snorting, ironic little laugh that Mac recognized she herself made at times when she was caught by the irony of an otherwise upsetting situation. She wondered what mannerisms Charlie’s genetics and personality would take up from Will or her, and felt her heart swell with anticipation at having her daughter in her arms instead of . . . ouch! . . . sitting on her bladder. 

“Sometimes,” Margaret continued, a twinkle in her eyes, “I don't know who’s more in love with Will, you or Teddy.”

“I am. I assure you,” Mac replied, pushing on her belly trying to shift Charlotte a little to the right. 

Noticing what her daughter was doing, Margaret chuckled. “Yes, I'm sure you win, but it's close.” She sobered. “Teddy was so disappointed . . .”

“In me,” Mac finished, breathing deeply as Charlotte somersaulted into a more comfortable position. 

“In the thought of not having Will for a son . . . but, Mackie, you did let us all believe that your . . . affair . . . with Brian happened around the holidays. We had just seen you and Will together. You two were so happy, so much in love, so . . . well, so much the way you are now . . . “ Margaret’s brow knit at the recollection. “Your behavior with Brenner seemed . . . inexplicably unlike you.” MacKenzie nodded. “Why, Mackie? Why didn't you tell us the truth . . . that it had happened years before, shortly after Brian broke things off and you started seeing Will?”

“I don't know, Mum. I didn't want to talk of any of it. For weeks . . . more than a month . . . when I had to talk to you or Daddy, I pretended that Will and I were still together. You must remember that.”

That wasn't an explanation, of that Margaret was sure, but she decided not to pursue the subject any further on this call. She knew from Ted that Will believed that Mackie had been protecting him, willing to let people think she had cheated on him after they’d been together for almost two years rather than let on how irrational he had been when she'd tried to tell him the truth. 

“Mackie,” Margaret began again, “I want you to know that I'm so proud of you for the way that you have . . . recovered from the loss of your . . . son.” She saw tears fill Mac eyes. “And I'm so happy that you’re going to have another child.” Tears filled her own. “I just wish . . .” Margaret swallowed hard. “I had not let things go as I did.”

"Mum, there was nothing you could have done,” Mac began again, more insistently this time.

Margaret exploded. “Bollocks, Mackie! Don't be a goose. I knew that you were hiding something. I knew that you wouldn't let me hug you or see you except in layers of clothing. Dear Lord . . . as I hear myself now . . . I was such an idiot! I should have suspected . . . the idea that you were pregnant seems as obvious now as the nose on my face. As for there being nothing I could have done to discover what was going on . . . “ She shook her head decisively. “I could have grabbed you and held you to me . . . I'm not a weak woman . . . I would have felt your belly before you could have pulled away . . . Bleeding hell, MacKenzie, I could have crept into your room while you were sleeping and run my hands over you.”

Perhaps it was because MacKenzie was speaking with her mother, not only as the child this time, but also as a woman with child, but she heard the heartbreak and frustration in Margaret’s voice with new understanding. It was an understanding that broke through all of the barriers she'd erected around this subject and washed over her in an unstoppable tidal wave of anguish.

“Mummy, I’m . . . I'm sorry . . . I'm so sorry.” Mac started to sob, her words coming between increasingly ragged breaths. “You can’t . . . know . . . no one can know . . . how deeply . . . desperately . . . I wish . . . that I'd told you I was pregnant . . . let you stop me . . . from going to Afghanistan. Sometimes I obsess on the . . . way things could have been different.” Mac paused, trying to calm herself. “If William had been born in Surrey. If Charlie . . . had arrived in D.C. a few weeks . . . maybe even a few days . . . earlier . . . if Leona hadn't delayed him . . . hadn't tried to talk him out of looking for me . . . he might might have been in time. If any of those things . . . had happened . . . William might have lived. Billy and I . . . we'd have . . . a six year old son . . . Charlotte would have a brother . . . “

“Mackie . . . Sweetheart,” Margaret murmured in a soft, loving voice that MacKenzie was suddenly sure she had heard from the moment she was born . . . or before, if what Will had been ready lately was correct. 

“Mummy,” Mac continued, her voice rising despite her efforts to control it. “I . . . I have dreams . . . and I see him. Sometimes we’re in the hotel room right after he was born. He was breathing so fast . . . I see . . . I think I remember . . . his little chest rising and falling so rapidly. Charlie and Monk . . . when Charlie was dying and Monk was bleeding out . . . they both started breathing slowly . . . at the end . . . “

Margaret McHale closed her eyes and let the thought of the deaths her daughter had seen wash over her . . . Charlie Skinner, the baby and someone who’s name she didn't recognize but assumed from MacKenzie’s reference to “bleeding out,” must have been military in Iraq. She loathed the ocean that separated her from her daughter . . . her baby. She wanted to take Mackie into her arms, hold her close, and wipe away the tears, kiss away the pain she saw in those green-brown eyes. Margaret wondered if she should speak, and try to end this discussion, but before she could make up her mind, MacKenzie spoke again.

“I don't remember that with William . . . maybe I didn't . . . didn't actually see him die. I can't be sure . . . in the dreams, I see . . . him stop . . . breathing . . . but I was fading in and out by then. Some things . . . really feel like memories . . . but others . . . I'm not sure.” Mac shrugged regretfully and wiped at her cheeks. “I mean I know that the dreams . . . where I see him older . . . a toddler or little boy . . . or where Nina has him . . . aren't memories . . . I think when I dream him . . . like that . . . it's from pictures I've seen of Will . . . when he was a little boy . . . “ Margaret wanted to ask who was Nina, but elected not to interrupt. “. . . but the dreams in Afghanistan . . . I know . . . some of them are . . . memory . . . but I don't always . . . know what . . . I'm remembering . . . or making up.” Now, Mac’s words were punctuated by bouts of coughing and each exhale ended in a wheeze. “I want to remember . . . I'm trying with . . . Doctor Habib . . . I think that . . . if I can . . . remember . . . I can process it . . . and the . . . nightmares and flashbacks . . . will stop.”

When Margaret McHale couldn't take one more minute of her daughter’s coughing, gasping and wheezing, she said, “Mackie . . . Mackie . . .” She almost had to shout to be heard over the sounds of her daughter’s tortured breathing. “For God’s sake, you must have a blue puffer around there somewhere.” She fought to take the slightly strident chord she heard out of her voice. “Mackie, darling,” she said more softly, “Please, please, use it now.” Mac looked into her mother’s eyes and saw a maternal concern that she recognized in a way that had eluded her before this. She glanced down at her enormous belly and thought of the child curled up there. Nodding into the camera, Mac reached into her desk drawer and removed the inhaler and spacer. She shook and primed the inhaler by sending two puffs into the air. She did it in full view of the camera, giving in to a childish urge to show her mother that it hadn't been used in a long time. Then, attaching the spacer, Mac took two puffs in four slow deep breaths, as Jonathan Fischer had showed her how to do. She had to admit that she found the whole ritual distracting and oddly calming. She felt the constriction in her chest lessen a bit and her breathing slow. Another puff and her tears, cough and wheeze were mostly gone.

"Okay," Mac said softly. “I'm fine.”

“Well, there was never any question of that,” her mother replied. “But there’s no reason to suffer.”

“I know. I just hate it . . . using medicine . . . needing to use medicine.” Mac smiled and then sighed deeply. “God, Mummy, sometimes I feel like such a cock up, I wonder if I have any business having a child.”

“Mackie! What are you saying? You’re going to be a brilliant mum.”

Mac wiped her eyes. “Yeah, right. One with PTSD,” she said, the deep seeded fear coming out before she could sensor her words. “I worry about Charlie having a mother who has nightmares and . . . panics sometimes at loud noises on the street.”

“Alright, let's assume that you do have PTSD, what of it? Charlie will learn resilience and grit. She will know that her parents have endured enormous, damaging trauma, and have made a loving home and family. There’s nothing wrong in that. You don't have to be perfect for her. You don't have to deny your weaknesses to be a parent, and neither does Will,” Margaret replied with the characteristic bluntness that Mac somehow strangely had always found comforting. “Really, I think that it's going to be harder for Will to overcome his PTSD since his traumas are more directly connected to childhood.”

"What do you mean?” Mac sounded genuinely confused.

“Surely, MacKenzie, you don't think that Will emerged unscathed from a childhood of terror, violence and beatings,” her mother replied, and proceeded to repeat some of the boyhood memories that Teddy had told her Will had related to him in Canada.

Mac felt almost insanely protective of her husband. “He's done a fantastic job of overcoming his childhood,” she countered defensively. “He’s gentle and kind and . . . .” Mac’s words drifted as her expression softened at a memory of being in bed with Will that morning. “He's an incredible father already. He talks to Charlie all the time, she's going to know his voice as well as she knows mine when she’s born, and . . .”

“Hold your horses, there,” Margaret stopped the flow of words. “I don't doubt any of that, and it's not what I was addressing. Obviously, Will is loving and caring, and a strong-minded, brilliant and self-aware person. So are you. Your daughter is going to have fantastic parents. Many, many cuts above the caliber of people with whom most children on this planet get to grow up. But as you say about yourself, the stresses of the traumas he suffered are there. They don't go away. You don't appoint yourself your mother’s protector at the age of 10 without a cost. You don't stop your father from grievously injuring your mother by breaking a fifth of gin over his head without paying an enormous emotional price.” Margaret lowered her voice, aware that it had gotten louder than she'd intended.

Mac nodded, but her thoughts were on a younger Will, on the little boy, barely out of diapers, for whom intense physical and emotional pain would descend without warning, and at incomprehensible and unpredictable times. Christmas Eve. His birthday. God! Security and safety must have felt like the cruelest of illusions to him. It seemed almost incomprehensible to her that that such a life as his could be survived. Her heart swelled with pride that Will had not only lived, but became the man she knew. She found herself asking if he could be faulted for believing that morning at breakfast when she’d said the word “Brian,” that once again there was to be no love, no happiness, no security for him. She knew she'd been babbling, but she remembered her shock when he’d interrupted and asked if she'd slept with Brian, and then, the disorientation and panic that had overwhelmed her, and had had her bungling the answer. If only he'd asked it “are you sleeping with Brenner” instead of “did you sleep with him,” she'd have answered, “ no,” instead of “yes,” and everything might have been . . . would have been . . . different. Oh, he wouldn't have been pleased, but then she'd not expected him to be . . . isn't that why she’d delayed until it was a huge deal . . . until . . . Mac wrapped her arms more protectively around Will’s baby inside her . . . until William’s existence forced her hand. 

But, she felt sure . . . more certain than ever before . . . that what had happened to Will that morning was an accident of occurrence . . . the particular words she’d spoken or way she'd said them had set off a memory . . . no, memories are more conscious . . . had set off a connection to the past. No, not right either, a . . . a . . . . Suddenly, the words she'd been searching for were screaming in Mac’s brain. The words were “flashback to the trauma.”

Margaret watched as Mac contemplated . . . something . . . for a very long time. “Mackie, have I offended you?” she asked at length.

“What? Oh, sorry . . . no. No! Of course not, Mum. I was just thinking . . . that morning in D.C. when I made a dog’s dinner out of telling Will about Brian and the baby . . . I think that what happened to Will was a kind of PTSD flashback. He fled, Mummy. He asked if I'd slept wth Brian and when I said I had, it was like a compulsion he couldn't control. He had to get away.” Mac’s eyes filled with tears, and Margaret could see that her daughter too was reliving a trauma. “That need . . . that drive . . . to run from the pain . . . I remember . . . it was like hurt and betrayal were radiating from him . . . .” Tears appeared in the lower lids of MacKenzie’s eyes but did not fall. “I could see the pain he was in like an aura on his skin . . . and I couldn't . . . reach him, Mummy, I couldn't find the words to make him . . . not look at me with those dead eyes. He hated me, Mummy. I wasn't afraid of him physically, even then, but he looked at me with such hatred. I couldn't think. I couldn't breathe.” Mac was suddenly aware that this was all new to Margaret. She had shut her mother out of her life . . . from the moment Will had shut her out of his, she’d withdrawn from everyone else.

Margaret pondered saying many things. In the end, she came down on the side of closing down the discussion. Mac’s pale exhausted face told her that her daughter had talked enough of these things for one evening. But she wanted desperately to keep this new and surprising dialog open. “Mackie . . . darling, how would it be if I popped over to see you for a few days?”

“Could you?” The sniffle that accompanied the words took Margaret back to a weekend during Mackie’s first term at Cheltenham when the entire family had descended en mass and taken their dreadfully homesick eldest for an impromptu holiday. 

“Of course. I won't even be in your hair since I've got a standing invitation from Lee Lansing to bunk in with her.”

“No! Stay with us. I can clean out one of the guest rooms. It’s mostly stuff for the nursery which I need to finish in any event.” Mac patted her stomach.

“Then, perhaps we can tackle it together. But I'm not going to impose on you and Will.” Margaret paused. “And, I think Lee’s desperately lonely, Mackie. She lost so much so fast.”

Mac nodded, and blew her nose. The worst had passed, at least for now, Margaret observed with satisfaction. “I know.” Mac looked at her mother. “Does it scare you? Sometimes when I think about . . . outliving Will, I almost can't . . . function.”

“Well, that’s a conversation for another day, but, yes, being the longer-lived gender can truly suck.” Then, Margaret smiled a small reflective smile as if she were deciding whether to speak. “Mackie," she sighed, "we all . . . you and Will, your father and I . . . we have so many regrets. It would be easy . . . human . . . to let our guilt drown out our capacity to . . . enjoy the here and now. We can't allow that to happen. We must be vigilant and guard against it . . . because if we don't, we shall all lose something precious, but it will be Charlotte who ultimately will pay the greatest price." After a moment's pause, during which Mac nodded but didn't speak, her mother continued brightly, "I'll email my travel plans. I love you madly. See you soon.” And with that, Margaret McHale rang off.

In the anteroom off of Mac’s office, Millie sat in stunned silence, trying to compose herself before facing MacKenzie again. She had not intended to eavesdrop. But the voices had become emotional and high-pitched, and it was impossible not to hear. She had actually rooted around in her purse looking for a pair of earbuds for her smartphone, and then remembered that they were lying uselessly on her nightstand. So she had just resigned herself to being privy once again to her boss’s private matters. She had heard a great deal in her years outside of Charlie’s office, and often wondered if the lack of soundproofing in the glass walls at ACN offices was the result of cutting construction costs or a concerted choice by Mrs. Lansing. 

“Millie!” Mac called out. “You’re released from your post. I'm sorry. If I'd known how long that call would go on, I'd never have asked you to stay.” When there was no immediate reply, Mac asked, “Millie, are you out there or did you . . . “

“Still here,” Millie forced herself to say, hoping desperately that her voice sounded normal to MacKenzie because it certainly didn't sound normal to her. “Not a problem, Mac. I’m actually catching up on some work. Going to stay a little while longer and finish up.” Millie couldn't imagine leaving Mac until she was sure Mac’s breathing and emotions were both okay. Dear God, Millie thought, how could MacKenzie ever be okay again after what she had endured. And Will, as well. 

"Seriously? You’re going to stay longer? Well, suit yourself.” 

Millie heard the sound . . . she didn't think that Mac was aware of how often by the end of the day she groaned when rising or seating herself . . . that Millie recognized as Mac moving locations from her desk chair to the sofa. She heard the noise made by a corrugated paper box being opened.

Over the years, Millie had perfected her role as the soul of discretion despite being privy to many things, including enough of Charlie’s conversations with Mrs. Lansing to deduce that Reese was most likely his son. Nancy Skinner had been the one to tell Millie that Reese’s paternity was now being openly acknowledged at least “within the ACN-Lansing-Skinner family,” as Nancy had put it. Millie remembered clearly the blessed feeling of being relieved of the need to feign shock. What had come out of her mouth was, “well, that explains everything, doesn't it?”

Nancy had nodded glumly. “The great mystery of Arthur’s disinheriting one of his children.” She smiled. “I don't imagine he had any problem disinheriting Charlie’s son. He had to know the kind of power he was giving the twins.” Then, a look of intense pain creased her brow and darkened her eyes. “I don't believe in the kind of heaven from which the departed peer down on us, or even float in the ether, so I take comfort that Arthur was denied seeing . . . “ Nancy had swallowed hard, and continued, “. . . just how complete his revenge turned out to have been.”

Millie had overheard many of Charlie’s and Will’s conversations in the months after Will’s return from D.C. She couldn't believe that Mrs. Lansing had allowed Charlie to hire Will to be the anchor of their flagship show. Will had been shell shocked and dead-eyed, despite or perhaps because of what she knew from Charlie’s rants was a daily cocktail of antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications. There had been no doubt in Millie’s mind that Will was not just suffering from a bruised ego at having been rejected by a woman. He had lost the most important person in his life. And, all the while . . . . Millie stopped and shook her head at the tragedy. He had lost . . . she had lost. 

Mac’s talking about Charlie’s going to look for her brought back the memory of him screaming at Will that MacKenzie’s calling, texting and emailing multiple times a day didn't sound any fucking thing like someone who'd left him to reconcile with an old boyfriend. Will had appeared unable to comprehend Charlie’s meaning, Millie remembered. Certainly, Charlie had been powerless to affect Will’s view of things or alter his behavior. So, Charlie had gotten it into his head that he'd go talk to MacKenzie, see what her motives were if she was indeed trying to get Will back, or find out why if she was with Brenner, she didn't just leave Will alone. Millie remembered Charlie returning with the news that Mac had left for the UK and then the Middle East. Even more vivid was the memory of Will learning that Mac was briefly back in the states, in Atlanta, but was returning within weeks to the war zone in Iraq as an embedded reporter-producer. He had been beside himself with rage, but what Millie had seen most was the sick, paralyzingly fear in his eyes. It was one of the few times that Charlie stopped Will from taking the anchor desk for a show.

Millie rubbed her burning eyes. But that MacKenzie had been pregnant, and the child had died . . . Dear Sweet Lord! How could Mac not be terrified by Charlotte’s impending birth? Millie brought her hands up to cover her mouth, as she blinked rapidly to contain the tears that sprang into her eyes. Mac had labored alone . . . without support . . . or companionship . . . and then saw the baby born alive, only to die. How did she get out of bed in the morning?

And Will . . . Millie had known from things Charlie had said that Will’s father had been impossible to please and was given to physically disciplining his son. But none of it had prepared her for what she'd overheard Mac and her mother discussing. He'd hit his father with a bottle of booze believing him to be about to kill his mother and then become a complaining witness to secure a conviction for child and spousal abuse . . . all at the age of 10. Her heart ached for the child Will had once been. He'd protected his mother, but who had protected Will, Millie mused.

She was so lost in these thoughts that Millie was unaware of the passage of time until the sound of someone entering the anteroom made her look up into the relaxed, smiling face of Will McAvoy.


	23. Two Mothers and a Father

With a giggle, the ninth Countess of Ailesbury blew out a breath and handed the vaporizer to Leona Lansing. Looking out on the Winter snow drifting past the Penthouse balcony, she began singing along with Joanie Mitchell: “I came upon a child of God, he was walking along the road . . . And I asked him, where are you going . . . This, he told me . . .”

Leona exhaled the breath she'd been holding, and said dreamily, “I missed Woodstock. But I was in Chicago. You know, the 1968 Democratic convention,” she prompted when Maggie McHale looked blank. “Won't you please come to Chicago for the help that you can bring,” Leona sang the lyrics to the Crosby, Stills and Nash song, “We can change the world, re-arrange the world . . . .”

“Oh, yes, of course,” MacKenzie’s mother nodded, things coming into a hazy focus. “Although, I think that song was actually written about the trial, not the convention.”

“Yes, but there would have been no trial without the convention,” Leona rejoined. 

Maggie nodded as if this statement were the wisdom of the sages. “Were you one of the protesters?” she asked.

Leona laughed. “Don't I wish. It would make for a much better story. I was an intern with Fortune Magazine. It had a delegation doing a story about the convention. I was their go-for.” Lee smiled at the memory. "They sent me out for sandwiches and coffee, and I ended up in Grant Park. Almost didn't make it back.”

“That's a great story. Tell me more.”

After Leona finished recounting her escape from Mayor Daily’s police force, they both sat in companionable silence for a few minutes. Then, Maggie sighed deeply.

“Tough day?” Leona inquired.

“No. Not tough. Emotional. Mackie showed me the little box that holds the baby’s ashes. She carried with her all during her time in Iraq.” Margaret shook her heard in a sad expression of wonder. “Now that I think about it, I recall seeing that parcel . . . brown paper and string . . . among Mackie’s things in Germany. Of course, I had more urgent worries on my mind at the time than figuring out what it might contain.” She looked at Leona with glistening eyes. “We came so close to losing her . . . forever . . . when she was stabbed. In a way, we had lost her when she left for Afghanistan. She never wrote or called. But this was permanent. This was death.”

Lee gave a little nod, thinking about standing in a hospital corridor on Nantucket, staring at the pay phone receiver, not being able to bring herself to continue the charade of calling Arthur Lansing, and dialing Charlie Skinner instead.

”They’ve brought it home, you know, the box with the baby’s . . . William’s ashes.” 

Lee nodded, but said nothing.

“Mackie said that Will didn't like the idea of him being alone in a bank safe.” Margaret closed her eyes and let her head fall back on one of the overstuffed down cushions on the love seat she shared with Leona. “I don't think that after . . . William . . . there was any way for Mackie to put herself back together without being with . . . or at least, seeing Will again . . . and telling him about his son.” Margaret paused again, reflecting, and then opened her eyes and looked directly into Lee’s. “I think the fact that she needed to reconnect with Will again,” Maggie continued, “ . . . no matter the outcome . . . was what Charlie saw in that bowling alley in Washington. . . I think, in part, that's what he was acting upon when he offered her the job at News Night.” 

She took a deep breath, as emotion choked her voice. Breaking eye contact, Margaret looked at the ceiling molding, blinking back tears. “I thank God daily that it all happened in the best way imaginable . . . the way most likely to allow Mackie to recover . . . at least as completely as humanly possible . . . from the ordeal of having her first baby die. I will always love Charlie Skinner for taking care of my daughter.”

 

Washington, D.C., Early March, 2010

It took a minute for the call to be routed from Charlie’s office number at ACN, which she'd dialed from the card he'd given her in the bowling alley bar that morning. Finally, the cellphone lying on the desk in his room at the Willard Hotel, chirped the signal that he had an incoming call. During the seconds that it took for the transfer, MacKenzie almost lost her nerve and hung up. 

Crossing the twilight-bathed room, Charlie Skinner glanced at the familiar number. Forgetting that he'd only given MacKenzie his office number, he felt a pang of disappointment. He'd stayed in D.C. in the hope that she'd call him and continue their conversation. Give him the opportunity to fertilize the seeds he hoped he'd planted that morning. Sighing, he picked up the phone, and said, “Hello,” expecting to hear Millie’s dulcet tones. 

“Mr. Skinner?” The voice was young, and, he realized in a flash of adrenalin, English.

“Yes.” Silence. “MacKenzie? MacKenzie, is that you?”

“I've been thinking about your offer.” She paused a beat before continuing. “I'd like to discuss it further . . . “

“Let me pick you up and take you to dinner,” he interrupted.

“Oh!” She sounded taken aback, and he wondered if he'd moved too fast. “You’re still in Washington,” she continued, “I . . . I'd assumed you’d have gone back to New York.”

“No. I've some business here tomorrow,” he lied. “So I'm staying over. If you have no plans for dinner this evening, I'd love to have the company. We can talk about my offer over a nice meal.” And I can see about getting some meat back on those bones, he finished silently to himself.

She snorted a sad little laugh. “No. No plans. No plans at all.”

He took her to the Old Ebbett Grill, explaining that the dark stained mahogany booths and wainscoting with its smell of lemon oil polish made him feel like an old-fashioned newspaperman again. She sat opposite him in a crisp white cotton blouse and navy blue silk slacks, her camel hair blazer tossed casually on the seat beside her. Dressed up, MacKenzie seemed even younger and more frail than she had appeared that morning. They made small talk while they ordered. He had learned from having difficult conversations at meals with his children, that if he wanted to eat or have them eat, he should keep the meal time talk light. It worked again. Despite the palpable tension in the air, he was rewarded by Mac’s consuming a descent portion of her crab cakes, the Grill’s signature dish, a salad and a glass of iced tea. He had not offered her alcohol nor consumed any himself.

Finally, the meal completed, and cups of coffee in front of them, Charlie turned the subject to News Night and his hopes for the future. He watched her get caught up completely in the idea of making it into a first-class news show with its guiding principle to provide only that news which an informed electorate needed to understand the policy implications of current events. She was obviously very bright, and had a lot of good ideas. Beyond that, her enthusiasm for reporting the news was infectious. He could see why Will had fallen for her. As they were finishing second cups of after dinner coffees, he finally got up the nerve to ask the question that had been simmering under the surface of his thinking all day.

“MacKenzie, are you still in love with Will?”

She felt as though she had been shocked with a 50 volt current. Her heart leapt into her throat, and she swallowed several times in a effort to get it to go back down to its usual location. She knew that the right answer . . . the answer that would secure her the job she suddenly realized she desperately wanted . . . was that she hoped that Will would be a friend and colleague, but she had no desire to resume their romantic involvement. She opened her mouth to say just that when her eyes locked onto Charlie Skinner’s sincere, guileless face, and she knew that she owed this kind generous man the truth.

MacKenzie’s head nodded just a second before she spoke. “Yes,” she breathed, “I think that there are just some relationships and connections in life that one simply doesn't move on from. Billy . . . . My feelings for Will . . .” She shrugged. “I'm sure that’s not what you want to hear, and I truly believe that I can keep it from interfering . . . that I can do the job . . .”

“No!” Charlie interrupted, “it's exactly what I want to hear.” Mac’s eyes went wide with surprise. “I love him too,” Charlie said softly. “He needs . . .” Charlie sighed. “This isn't going to be easy for you, MacKenzie. You’re going to find a angry, isolated, heartbroken man when you get to New York. I don't think Will has anyone in his life whom you would call a friend. He can't seem to relate to people or care about them. He's built this wall around himself and the only thing that gets through it is the audience . . . at least as long as they applaud him. It's like he's trying to get and keep the love of a million people to make up for losing yours.” 

Charlie’s eyes had drifted into his coffee cup as he spoke so he had missed the tears that welled up and spilled over in MacKenzie’s. It wasn't until he heard a tiny sob that she couldn't suppress that he looked up and saw her chewing on her lower lip while tears coursed down her cheeks. Impulsively, he reached over and cupped her chin in his hand, running his thumb over the indentations that her teeth had left. 

“I suppose I failed to mention that I require all of my Executive Producers to have functioning lower lips,” he dead-paned in a voice nonetheless laced with compassion and his own sadness.

Mac started to laugh . . . it was a genuinely funny remark . . . but then, something . . . the feel of Charlie’s thumb on her lip, perhaps . . . transported her back to Will’s once saying that he intended to be kissing that lip for the next fifty years and she needed to take better care of it. A sound, half moan, half sob tore from her throat. Although she did her best to muffle it, the woman in the booth across the aisle sent a surreptitious glance in their direction.

“What happened, MacKenzie? To you and Will?” Charlie asked quietly. “Can you tell me?”

“Hasn't Will told you?” she asked, wiping her eyes with her napkin.

“Well,” Charlie dropped his hand from her face and sat back a little in his side of the booth, “Will’s description is a little long on imagery, like having his heart torn out, sautéed in oil and cut into tiny pieces . . .” He saw her wince involuntarily. “. . . and short on facts. All he's really said is that you left him to go back to a former boyfriend.”

She seemed to stop breathing, and a look of stunned disbelief consumed her face. “He said that?!” she gasped after a moment during which it seemed to Charlie that she could barely process his statement. “Billy told you that I left him?! He told you that? That I went back with Brian!” Her face seemed to crumple in, as tears once again filled her eyes and her lower lip went back between her teeth. Then, she shook her head as if the reality of what Charlie had said was unbearable. “He said that.” It wasn't a question this time. “Does he actually believe it? He can't. He just can't. I was ordered to go. I didn't leave him. My God, Charlie, I was . . . .” 

She bit off the thought, clamping her mouth shut. Slowly, she lowered her head into her hands. At first, Charlie thought that her shoulders were trembling because she was crying, but then he noticed that she was shaking all over, and breathing in rapid, shallow breaths. He'd seen PTSD many times before, and as he had at the bowling alley, he suspected that he was seeing it again. When her nose spontaneously began to bleed, he was sure of it.

Seeing that she didn't want to soil the restaurant’s napkin, he handed her a linen handkerchief, and waiving away her protests about using it to staunch the blood, said, “I'm going to pay the check, Mac, and then we’ll take a little walk. I hope you will tell me what happened with Will. I want to help you . . . both.”

They walked. It was difficult walking away from the Willard along the same streets and past the buildings where she and Will had walked so many times. Evening strolls, hand-in-hand, around the monuments and flood-lit government buildings had been something of a ritual, if not an aphrodisiac, during their two years together. She didn't say much until she and Charlie stopped to admire the American Red Cross Headquarters building on 17th Street at D, which had been one of her favorite Washington landmarks since childhood. Then, taking a steadying breath, MacKenzie began to describe her decision to tell Will about Brian “because we were getting so serious, I thought we should just get it out of the way. And,” she paused, “I didn't trust Brian not to find some way of telling Will himself, not if it got out that we were about to marry.”

She described the events at breakfast as clearly as she could remember them. The desolation in her expression and voice as she talked about Will packing up and leaving her tore Charlie to the bone.

“He wouldn't listen to anything you said after you answered his question about sex in the affirmative?”

She shook her head. “I can't explain it. I can't even articulate it very well, Mr. Skinner . . .”

“Charlie.”

“Charlie. He seemed to go away. I couldn't reach him. Nothing I did could reach him. It was like he needed to escape, and that was all he could think about.”

She described the weeks and months of emails and voice messages telling Will that she was sorry, begging him to respond, to please, just listen. She told Charlie about learning from Darius Walker that Will had left D.C. and returned to ACN in New York, and how she'd been “a mess,” and on the verge of being fired when Darius offered her a gig in Afghanistan if “I'd get myself sorted.” “It worked out,” she'd said simply, and so she'd re-uped in the Middle East, came back to Atlanta and assembled a crew, and then returned to Iraq to report on the war. If it hadn't been for the very real pain that Charlie had seen emanating from Will on a daily basis these last two and a half years, it would have been easy after seeing Mac to have just written him off as intolerant, heartless and unforgiving. What a clusterfuck! Charlie wondered if he'd ever seen two people so obviously in love do so much damage to one another. Well, possibly, but he wasn't going to go there.

As if on cue, a woman appeared, pushing an empty stroller and chasing a small blond boy along the Mall, and caught both of their attentions. The child looked remarkably like a small copy of Will McAvoy. Charlie noticed that MacKenzie seemed mesmerized by the scene. So much so that he asked casually, “do you want children?”

She didn't respond for such a long time that he assumed that she hadn't heard him. When she turned in his direction, Charlie realized that had he been a little less taken by the child’s resemblance to Will, he might have noticed the expression on MacKenzie’s face, and kept his big mouth shut. The naked sorrow in her eyes seemed so raw that it caused him to take in an audible breath.

“Are you asking me if I want babies with Billy?” she asked incredulously. He couldn't tell if she found it surprising that he'd asked or that he didn't already know the answer. Then, she paused, frozen and consumed with her own thoughts for so long that Charlie considered answering her in the negative. Anything, to stop this conversation that was obviously ripping her apart. But, before he could speak, she continued, saying, “more than . . .” The next word was swallowed by a sob, and she turned her body away from him, and doubled over slightly at the waist, wrapping her arms around her body and breathing in gasps. “Mr. Skinner . . . Ple . . . Please . . . I . . . I can't . . . talk . . . about . . . . Please . . . .” Charlie felt paralyzed and rooted to the spot, with no idea what to do next. After several more ragged breaths, MacKenzie spoke again, her voice sounding a little stronger. “Tell me about ACN,” she requested, starting to straighten up. “What’s working there like? What’s Mrs. Lansing like?”

And so, as they began to walk again, he described the corporate structure at Atlantis World Media and ACN, and gave her a brief rundown of the network’s divisions and bureaus, its principal programming and talent. Then, strangely, he found himself talking about Vietnam, and the beautiful, young determined reporter he had met there, a woman not unlike herself, who now ran a media empire, and was his boss, his nemesis and partner, and, he did not mention, the mother of his son. He talked of being a soldier in wartime, and gradually she opened up and spoke of Iraq and Afghanistan and the men and boys she had known and watched die there. 

They found themselves sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, staring into a pitch-black moonless night, with the craggy visage of the sixteenth President looking down on them. The night had turned cold enough to remind them that March was still Winter, and he'd taken off his jacket and wrapped it around her knees when she'd begun to shiver. Charlie’s arm had gone around her shoulders as she'd described the death of a man called Monk, who had given his life for her and then bled-out in her arms before the medics arrived. By the end of her tale, her head rested against Charlie Skinner’s chest, and he ached for the fact that a girl her age had seen so much horror and death.

“Tell me about the stabbing,” he prompted quietly. “This morning, you said that you had been stabbed.” He already knew a bit about it from colleagues at CNN, but he wanted to hear it from her. And so she told him, told him about the riot, and Jim Harper saving her life, about the field surgery and the sepsis and the evacuation to Germany, about how after it, she'd started emailing Will again.

“How was it that this was not reported anywhere?”

“I didn't want Billy . . .” she said hastily. “I wanted it ignored, and my father called in a couple of favors with General Craddock and Ted Turner, and it was buried,” she replied matter-of-factly.

“Your father knows Ted Turner and General Craddock?” Charlie asked incredulously, repeating the names of the founder of CNN and the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

“Not Craddock. I think he was put in touch with General Craddock by John McCall, whom he knows well,” MacKenzie replied, referring to the British General who was the current Deputy Supreme Commander. “Turner is more of an acquaintance than a friend, but they know each other.”

Suddenly, Charlie wondered just whose daughter he had in his arms, but elected not to ask. Instead, he gave her hair a little stroke, and said, “we need to go. Get you home to bed.”

“It's okay. I don't sleep,” she whispered.

“Yeah? Well, neither does he,” Charlie whispered back.

She sat up abruptly, and turned toward him. “Billy? You’re joking. Billy sleeps like a rock. Believe me. I should know. I slept on top of him every night for the better part of two years and he hardly ever awakened, and if he did, he simply pulled me to him and rolled over . . . and . . . went . . . back . . . to sleep.” She ran out of steam as the pain engendered by the memory claimed her.

Charlie's mind was suddenly filled with the recollection of a conversation he'd had with Will a few months before when he'd ragged on his star anchor about looking tired and haggard on air. Whirling in anger, Will had shouted that Charlie wanted him to date, so he was fucking well dating! Then, calmer, Will had explained that he simply couldn't sleep . . . had never been able to sleep with someone else in bed with him, and he couldn't very well ask a woman whom he'd just screwed to get dressed and leave his apartment in the middle of the fucking night, so he let the woman du jour have the bed, while he prowled around, or maybe caught a few winks in a chair.

“Not anymore,” Charlie said softly, coming back to the present. “He doesn't sleep well anymore."

“Charlie, what have I done?” She looked at him, worrying her bottom lip again, until miserable and devastated, she slowly lowered her head.

In a sudden burst of clarity, the older man grabbed her shoulders and turned to face her square on. “Nothing, kiddo, nothing. MacKenzie, look at me,” he commanded in the quiet forceful voice he often used at Board meetings, and with Reese, Katie and Sophie. “You did nothing that wasn't . . .” Charlie struggled for precisely the right word, and finally said, “inconsequential. You did nothing that shouldn't have been completely inconsequential to your relationship with Will.”

She looked as though someone had handed her a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. It wouldn't last, but in that moment, Charlie saw that MacKenzie was capable of forgiving herself, and seeing her “sins” objectively, which was essential if Will’s anger in the coming weeks was not going to destroy her. 

“Yes! Yes, exactly!” She reached up excitedly and clasped her hands on his arms and shook them in unison. “That’s exactly what it was . . . inconsequential.” She said the word slowing, emphasizing each syllable. “My God, Charlie, it was like I couldn't even remember Brian.” Charlie assumed that Brian was the lover. The name sounded familiar like maybe Will had mentioned it in passing. “In the beginning,” MacKenzie continued, relief and an animation he hadn't seen before evident in her eyes, “well, I don't know what I was doing with Brian . . . I saw him again out of loyalty, I suppose, or maybe I just couldn't admit that I'd thrown away three years of my life convincing myself that we were in love.” She shrugged. “But by the time I told Billy about it . . . honest to God, it felt like it had been so long ago that it had been someone else with Brian, not me. By then, Will was everything to me. I felt like I'd never been with another man . . . that I'd been a virgin when I'd come to Will.”

Just as suddenly as the fire had been stoked, it died, her shoulders sagged and her eyes looked away, focusing on some undetermined middle distance. “But I couldn't get any of that across to Billy,” she sighed. “I don't think he heard me . . . or if he did, he didn't care.”

“He cares. I know he cares. Come on, Mac. You can't give up. You’ve got another fight left in you, I can tell.” For a split second, she flashed on Burgess Meredith in “Rocky,” and almost smiled. “You and I,” Charlie continued, “nothing can stop us . . . we’re going to put this thing back together. We’re going to get you sleeping again, kiddo, you and your ‘Billy,’ back where you both belong. Okay? We’re going to do this? Are you with me, kiddo?”

Even as she nodded her agreement, Mac wondered if Charlie’d ever heard of all the King’s horses and all the King’s men, and then, realized that he was saying something about her being Dulcinea, and him being Don Quixote, and how tilting at windmills is the only way to the truly great victories in life. He sounded like the Ambassador, and at that moment, she regretted the degree to which she'd cut her father . . . her whole family, really . . . out of her life since . . . Afghanistan.

“You know,” she heard Charlie saying, “ I've never heard anyone call Will, ‘Billy.’” Charlie watched a little smile begin to play over Mac’s lips. “Billy,” he repeated slowly, chuckling, and then snorting out a laugh. “The way you say, Billy. I fucking love it.” Then his face grew somber. What a clusterfuck, he thought to himself once again. 

He looked Mac in the eyes again. “You asked me earlier if Will actually believes that you left him . . . stopped loving him or never loved him . . . anyway, that you threw him over for . . . what’s-his-name?”

“Brian.”

“Yeah, Brian.” She gave a little gesture for him to continue. “I think he does, Mac. It sounds crazy to me, too, especially after hearing it all from your perspective, but I think he does believe it.” Charlie sighed, turned her around in his arms and settled back. “What do you know of Will’s childhood?” he asked.

“What you know, I'm guessing,” she replied after a pause. “God, Charlie, Will’s childhood was part of the whole roller coaster ride of those last months together. He took me home to Nebraska for Thanksgiving, right before . . . well, a few months before, we broke up.”

As she started to tell him about meeting John McAvoy and Will’s sisters and brother, Charlie tucked his jacket more tightly around her, and settled her against him. Sleep for both of them would have to wait.


	24. Two Fathers

“Did Charlie ever tell you about his first conversation with Teddy?” A very stoned Maggie McHale asked an equally impaired Leona Lansing. 

Maggie had been staying with Lee for two nights now while she visited with Mac and Will. With Pruitt out of town, Mac had taken the day off and they had made great headway in getting the nursery ready for Charlotte. They had also set up the stand and the Moses basket beside Mac’s side of the bed, where the baby would sleep for the first few weeks of her life. Looking at it and then rubbing her belly, Mac’s eyes had filled with tears, as she'd told her mother that sometimes she still couldn't believe that this was happening. Then, she'd related her visit to the doctor and when she'd come back to England for Tessa’s christening, and disclosed his grave prediction that due to the damage from William’s birth, she’d never carry a child to term. Maggie recalled that while her daughter had tried valiantly to conceal it, she had been dreadfully upset and barely able to keep it together holding her niece while the priest poured water on her tiny forehead. Maggie’d not been surprised when Mackie’d announced as soon as was socially acceptable, that she needed to return to Iraq. Maggie had said nothing that morning in the warm bedroom where the new little family would sleep. She'd just put her arms around Mac and held her and kissed her for all of the times that she’d been unable to do so. 

“No,” Lee replied. “I knew that he'd talked to Ted because I nearly lost it when I heard that the woman he was serving up to Will on a silver platter had a father powerful enough to cause us grief in high places.” She laughed at the memory. “He just said that ‘Ted’ wasn't the vindictive sort and understood what he was doing.”

“We were both dreadfully concerned when we heard that Mackie was going to work with Will again.”

“Yeah, did Charlie mention that Will didn't know about it until the day she arrived in the studio. Charlie took him to lunch and told him he'd hired MacKenzie. Will totally freaked. He got his agent to renegotiate his contract, giving me back a million bucks a year for three years in return for the ability to fire her at the end of each week.” She paused. “It was Charlie’s idea to demand a million dollars a year.” 

Maggie's eyes grew large. “Three million dollars,” she repeated slowly. “He didn't want her there that badly?”

“That's not how Charlie took it. I mean we all thought Will had gone crazy. You should have heard Scott’s . . . his agent’s . . . voice when he relayed the news that Will had said to agree to my demands. But Charlie thought that it was a good sign, a sign that Will was terrified of the strength of his feelings for Mac. And, once again, score one for Mr. Skinner.” Lee smiled fondly, lost in her own thoughts. Then, after a minute, she looked again at Maggie and said, “All of the money, plus interest, is in a trust for Charlotte. I'm going to tell them at the hospital when she's born.”

Maggie reached out and grabbed Lee’s hand. “That's so sweet of you. I'm sure they’ll be touched.” Then, smiling a broad smile, she said, “so let me tell you what happened on our end when we heard about Charlie’s grand plan to reunite the star-crossed lovers.”

 

“Oh, Teddy! You’re not going to call him, are you?” Edward McHale’s wife had demanded several hours after they had played MacKenzie’s voice message for the tenth time. “Mackie will be positively incensed. She's not a child any longer. She doesn't need her daddy checking up on her.”

They had received a message on their phone answering machine the night before from MacKenzie saying that she was leaving Washington and taking a job in New York. Someone named Charlie Skinner had asked her to become the new Executive Producer of News Night. She had sounded tired, keyed-up, apprehensive and excited. Her parents had simply stared at each other when the message ended. What was going on, they wondered. Then, they had Googled Charlie Skinner and discovered that the offer had apparently come from the President of ACN. They followed that up by going on the network’s website and confirming that it was indeed still “ News Night with Will McAvoy.” All they could conclude was that this Skinner fellow must have no idea of the past history between Will and Mackie.

Ted had stewed most of the rest of the morning. He tried several times to reach MacKenzie, but got sent to voicemail. Finally, when Maggie left to have tea with a friend from school, he retreated to his study and called Atlantis Cable News and asked to be connected to Charlie Skinner. 

“Sorry to interrupt,” Millie’s voice said through the intercom on Charlie’s desk phone, “I have a Edward McHale on the line who’s asked to speak to you. He says that you don't know him, but you recently offered his daughter . . .” She paused and Charlie assumed that she was looking down at a note pad for the name that had already popped into his head. “. . . MacKenzie, a job,” Millie concluded, and then added, “you should hear his voice, Charlie, he sounds like the Prince of Wales.”

“Put him through, thanks.” Charlie heard a couple of clicks and then an open line. “Charlie Skinner,” he said. He heard someone take a breath, and waited.

“Mr. Skinner, this is Edward McHale,” Ted began, suddenly having absolutely no idea of how to structure this conversation. “I believe that you are acquainted with my daughter, MacKenzie.”

“Yes,” Charlie replied, “I met with her the day before yesterday.” As he spoke, he typed “Edward McHale” into his search window. Holy shit! Charlie almost said it out loud when the results were displayed on his screen. At first, Charlie thought maybe he had the wrong Edward McHale, but then he saw the Earl of Ailesbury’s list of offspring on the man’s Wikipedia bio: MacKenzie, Julian, Catherine, Greer and Thomas. Suddenly aware that he'd been silent a moment too long, Charlie began to speak rapidly, “MacKenzie’s a very talented journalist. I've seen her work on CNN both from the Middle East and before with Will. You must be very proud of her.”

“Yes. Yes, I am,” McHale replied. “I've not had the opportunity to speak with her since she left me a message saying that she was coming to work for you.” Now it was McHale’s turn to create a lull in the conversation. Charlie heard him sigh. “Mr. Skinner . . .”

“Please, call me Charlie, Mister . . . um . . . Sir . . .”

McHale chuckled. “The name’s Ted, Charlie.” This little exchange seemed to break the ice a bit. “Charlie, I don't usually get involved like this in my children’s lives now that they are all adults. I'm just . . . a bit concerned about Mackie . . . MacKenzie right now.” As well you should be, Charlie thought. “She's been through a great deal lately.” McHale sighed again. “I'm sure that getting back to work is what she needs to do . . .” Again a pause. “But, coming on to News Night . . . .” McHale let the thought trail off. 

This is ridiculous, he said to himself. Either say it or shut up. “I know you said that you were familiar with the show that MacKenzie did with Will McAvoy at CNN, but are you aware,” McHale sounded to Charlie like a man about to dive off a high rock, “that William . . . and MacKenzie . . . .”

“Are in love with each other?” Charlie finished for him.

“What! Um . . . well . . . yes, I suppose.” The voice now registered surprise. Then, McHale paused as if considering Skinner’s words. Finally, he spoke, “Mr. Skinner, are you saying that you think Will is still in love with my daughter?”

Charlie noted that her father did not seem to question that Mac still loved Will. “Completely,” Charlie replied. “In love with her. Obsessed with her. Tied to her. Unable to relate to other women because of her. Killing himself slowly with alcohol and loneliness for want of her. You name it.”

“You think he still cares for her?” McHale asked the question as if something about Charlie’s previous answer had somehow been unclear, and revealed just how rattled he was. 

Charlie smiled at the confusion in the cultured British voice. “Sir,” he said slowly and deliberately, “I think that MacKenzie is about the only person on this planet that Will McAvoy truly does care about, except maybe me . . . and his siblings.” Charlie waited a beat and when McHale didn't respond, continued, “I love Will like a son, and insofar as he's let anyone see what he's been going through these last few years, it's been me. If there’s one thing I've figured out, it's that this hasn't gotten any better for him.”

“Nor for her,” McHale acknowledged. “MacKenzie said that you went to D.C. looking for her.”

“Yes. I admit that my original motivation for that was completely about Will . . . helping Will. You see, News Night . . . its popularity seems to be all he has left, and . . .” Charlie paused, trying to decide exactly how he wanted to describe what he had been doing when he sought out MacKenzie. “I felt like the show was moving in the wrong direction, and worse, I believe that he knows it. I'd seen the work he'd done at CNN with Mac. It was crisp and incisive and sometimes even . . . brave. I was in touch with him back then. He was . . . alive . . . excited about his work, willing to take risks to develop a story that had meaning and substance.” Charlie’s voice, that had risen with excitement and emotion, fell. “At News Night, he's become a life-sized Ken doll in an Armani suit, afraid of the least bit of controversy.”

“The Jay Leno of cable news,” McHale supplied, with a mirthless chuckle. The grim tone to McHale’s voice told Charlie that he too did not regard the appellation as a compliment.

“Oh, you saw that?” Charlie was surprised. The article on Will had appeared in more of a trade publication than a mainstream magazine. 

“I . . . I've followed Will’s career,” McHale replied. “You believe that Mackie taking over as EP can reverse this trend, I take it.”

Again, Charlie carefully considered his words. “I guess my expectations have kind of evolved, but, yes, in the beginning that was the general idea,” he replied, “but l’m sure it would never have been enough. What I mean is coming at this from the perspective of a professional relationship between Will and Mac wasn't the right focus. I knew that when I saw MacKenzie,” Charlie sighed, “she’s an amazing girl, your daughter . . . and she's as unhappy as Will is . . . it’s just not layered over with as much anger. She loves him, and he so much wants and needs to be loved by her.” There was so much emotion in Charlie Skinner’s voice, it surprised Ted McHale. Charlie chuckled. “I wouldn't usually meddle like this, but I can't stop myself. They . . . It . . . it's unfinished . . . their lives together, and neither seems capable of moving on. I think they will pick up the pieces and heal each other,” Charlie concluded. “I really do. But one way or the other, neither can seem to get beyond their relationship until they finish it.”

“Yes,” McHale agreed grimly, thinking of last summer and his daughter deliriously murmuring, “Billy, Billy” over and over again as she regained consciousness at Landstuhl. “Yes,” he repeated. “It worries me, though, putting her working with Will again. As I said, she's been through a lot of trauma lately. Being an embedded reporter in a war zone is not for the faint of heart.” He wanted to tell Skinner that while covering a story, Mackie had been stabbed in the abdomen less than a year before, but he knew that she would be beyond incensed if he breached security on the issue. 

"I know. I saw that.” Charlie sensed that they were both talking about PTSD though neither would say it. “She’s told me a lot about what happened over there. I know she lost a lot of people she was close to, and that she was stabbed in Islamabad, and she's still getting over that.”

McHale was stunned. Mackie had confided in Skinner! He didn't know what to feel. Relief, jealousy and guilt all swirled together in his gut. He had driven his daughter so far away these last two and a half years.

Skinner spoke again. “I confess that when I started all this, I only had Will’s career in mind. And, I don't think I really understood the depth of the emotions between them until I got to know her. I know why you’re concerned. And you have good reason. I don't want to see your daughter hurt either. . . and I know that no one has the power to hurt her like Will.”

"Do you think he would harm her?” McHale interrupted.

“Harm her, no. But hurt her in the short run, that’s a distinct possibility.”

“I'm not sure I see that distinction,” McHale replied.

“Will’s angry . . . no, that's not quite right. Will’s been deeply hurt . . . some . . . maybe even much of it self-inflicted, but he blames MacKenzie for all of it.” McHale wasn’t sure he understood the reference to self-inflicted hurt, but he could identify with the rest. God help him, he knew that his inability to understand how Mackie could have let Brenner back into her life and her bed after so much time with Will bordered on blame. “So,” Charlie continued, “I can see Will wanting to say hurtful things to her, but . . . well, let me put it this way. If a gunman entered the room at the exact moment Will was telling Mac that he didn't care about her any longer and wanted her out of his life, there’s no doubt in my mind that he'd take the bullet right then and there to protect her. I think deep down Mac will see that too. He loves her. He's just . . . unable to let himself let go of the hurt.”

“Have you said any of this to Mackie?”

“All of it. Ted, I know that this isn't going to be easy on her . . . she knows it too . . . but I'll be there with her every step of the way. Doing the news with each other . . . they’ll heal . . . and I do believe, they’ll get it all back together and have a good life. In fact,” Charlie said, “I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a prediction. In ten years, Mrs. William McAvoy will be the president of this network.” 

McHale was speechless for a second. But his mind didn't have time to pursue the career implications of that statement. He was too filled with concern and fear that Charlie Skinner was overly optimistic about Will’s desire or capacity to forgive. After all, he'd been ignoring years of emails, texts and voice messages. “I hope you’re right,” he said with a sigh. “I worry about what might happen . . . that Mackie won't be strong enough to . . . bear up if things don't work out,” Ted confessed.

“So do I. But things are tough for her now, and she's hanging on. This way, at least she has a chance.” Then Charlie continued as if he could read McHale’s mind, “and, well, when they were apart, it was one thing for Will to ignore her attempts to reach him, and feed himself all the crap he has about how she tore out his heart and doesn't love him anymore, but I just don't see how he can do that when he looks into her eyes and sees what I saw there. It seems to me that all he has to do is hear her say his name to know that she never stopped loving him.”

Ted let out the breath he was holding. "Very well then," he said, "take care of my daughter."

"As if she were my own," Charlie promised.

 

Maggie’s expression turned somber. “We all miss Charlie a great deal. Teddy and I were stunned by his death. He wasn't overweight. He drank a bit more than was wise, perhaps, and I know he was under a lot of stress with the sale and all, but . . .” She shook her head. “It was a bolt out of the blue.” 

“For us all,” Lee replied in a voice choked with emotion, blinking furiously at the tears that threatened to fall.

Margaret squeezed her hand. “How’s Reese doing?” she asked. “Mackie says that Will is still grieving and a little lost without Charlie, even though he’s a grown man about to be a father himself.”

As Maggie had hoped, being directed to think about others helped Lee to compose herself. “I guess,” Leona said, “there’s no good age to lose your father.”


	25. Mother and Son

MacKenzie took the day off, and she and her mother spent most of Maggie’s last full day in New York at Buy Buy Baby on 7th Avenue. In addition to loading up on all of “the basics” recommended by her brother’s wife, Mac bought a Bugaboo stroller, with an infant bed attachment, which Maggie, despite her years in America, called “a pram.” Then as a gift, Maggie bought her daughter a compact, light-weight, collapsible MacLaren “pushchair” in a fabric that prominently featured a large Union Jack. It became Charlotte’s preferred mode of transportation, and it was all her parents could do to get her to share it with her brothers as they came along. Twenty-eight years later when Charlotte would renounce her American citizenship to marry a co-worker at the Tate, James Windsor, and become Viscountess Severn, Mac would joke that it was all Charlie’s grandmother’s fault for buying that “damned MacLaren stroller.”

Maggie had said good-bye to Lee at breakfast that morning since she was spending her last night in New York in Will and Mackie’s guest room. The women had been up half the night, talking mostly about Charlie. In a show of unprecedented trust and openness, Leona had told Maggie about her life with Charlie . . . Vietnam, his giving her up to prevent a rift with her father, her not being able (or willing) to tell him about the pregnancy and Reese, Nantucket, Charlie’s becoming President of ACN, and the life they had made for themselves. “We were careful never to touch,” Lee had said. “Oh, Charlie would put his hand on my back to steer me into a car or into a seat at a restaurant, but we made sure not to touch skin to skin. Only a few times . . . .” Lee had drifted off into her own thoughts. “I reached . . .” Her voice broke. “I reached for his hand . . . when I told him we had to sell to Pruitt.” And later, in the night, Lee confessed in a hushed tone, they had met at an apartment that AWM kept for visitors, which Charlie used on occasion when it had gotten too late for the drive to Connecticut. 

That night, both Maggie and Mac had turned in early, shortly after Will got home and they showed him the fruits of their shopping spree, so it didn't come as much surprise to Maggie that she awoke rather early the next morning. She was just putting the kettle on for tea when her son-in-law appeared in the doorway, looking sleepy and disheveled, and wearing a t-shirt and sweat pants that she assumed he had donned as a nod to her presence in his home. Although he usually retrieved his paper and took his coffee back to bed where he could read and sip and watch Mac sleep, this morning, Will sat in the breakfast nook and listened to her mother tell him stories about their early days in New York when Mac was a little girl.

 

This time the nightmare included Charlotte. And Green Park again. She was pushing a baby . . . Charlotte . . . in a pram . . . not the one she had purchased that afternoon, but the old-fashioned, fixed wheel kind . . . a Silver Cross . . . like the one she and her siblings had used when they visited her grandparents. The day was balmy and the park was crowded. Charlotte giggled and babbled, pulling at a cloth doll that Mac knew somehow her grandmother had given her. 

He came running toward her along the path, a tow-headed little boy of about five or six, in white trainers, with sturdy little legs moving rapidly below his short pants. His little arms pumped as he ran, and she could hear him breathless and panting from exertion. Suddenly, he stopped and looked up at her. MacKenzie froze. No! No! It couldn't be! Just then, Nina Howard appeared out of nowhere, and roughly grabbed the boy’s arm. He twisted away and tried to escape her grasp, looking again towards MacKenzie. She would know those eyes anywhere. Will’s eyes. Now they were fixed imploringly on her face. 

“Stop that! Get back here, you little brat!” Nina screamed, but the child continued to struggle. Mac stared, horrified, as Nina dug her nails into the little boy’s arm hard enough to draw blood. He shrieked and tried in vain to tug her hand free. They seemed to rock to the side and Mac realized that Nina was unsteady on her feet. 

“Let me go. You’re hurting me. Please. You’re hurting my arm. Please let me go.” Tears streamed down the child’s face, as blood from his arm dripped onto the pavement. 

“I'll hurt you, alright,” Nina snarled, but her words were slightly slurred and once again, she seemed to stagger as she held onto the struggling child.

Was she drunk? Yes, Mac realized, she was. Just then, Nina raised her free hand and sent it down fast, her open palm contacting hard with the little boy’s face. The cracking sound of the slap jolted Mac and caused Charlotte to begin to wail. 

“Stop that!” Mac called out, taking a step toward Nina.

Again the child’s blue eyes bore into Mac’s. “Mummy!” he cried. “Mummy!”

“She’s not your mummy,” Nina snarled, mimicking the British pronunciation of the last word.

“Mummy, help me. Help me. You have to protect me,” the reedy little voice implored. 

“Billy! Billy!” Mac screamed over and over.

And it all vanished to be replaced by the familiar nightmare. The room in Kabul. The pain. The coppery sent of blood. The little body lying so very still. “I’m sorry,” Mac mumbled weakly. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

 

It took Margaret a moment to recognize that the strangled sounds that made Will pause in mid-sentence were her daughter crying out. By then, Will was on his feet, sprinting for the bedroom. He already had MacKenzie in his arms when her mother rounded the corner, made her way down the short hallway, and entered the room. Together, they took care of her until MacKenzie emerged from the nightmare, and soothed by her mother gently rubbing her back and her husband stroking her hair and kissing her face and neck, she fell back into an exhausted sleep. Margaret got up first, and walked back to the kitchen. Mac had told her that she had nightmares and was seeing a therapist, but experiencing one left Margaret shaken. So she just stood in the middle of the room, gazing around as if she had never seen it before, lost in her thoughts. Finally, Will appeared and silently busied himself doing something that hardly registered with his mother-in-law. Then, he took her hand and led her down the hall to a room closer to the bedroom in which MacKenzie slept.

“Hearing her calling for ‘Billy’ takes me back to Landstuhl,” Maggie said, sinking down onto the down-cushioned sofa that Mac had installed, along with the matching chair-and-a-half and a bank of video-monitors, to turn one of the unused bedrooms into a cozy “media den.” Will handed her the cup of tea that she had been sipping when the nightmare started and sat down beside her. Maggie brought the cup to her lips and gave him a smile to acknowledge that he had warmed-up her tea. But she continued to be far away.

“Her bowel perforated . . . it was just a little nick, the deepest point the knife reached, and the triage doctors in Pakistan missed it. The fever started on the plane, but no one noticed.” Maggie sighed. “Of course, the Harper boy blamed himself for not seeing it sooner and alerting the medics that something was wrong.” Maggie’s lips curled up slightly in a half smile. “We told them at Landstuhl that he was our son, her brother, so that he'd be admitted to the ICU. He looked like he would go mad if he couldn't be near her.”

Will also smiled slightly dispute himself, mostly at hearing his current EP referred to as “the Harper boy.” Then, he said quietly, “He is her brother.” Maggie nodded.

“Once the doctors realized what was happening,” Maggie went on, “they delayed operating to get her stabilized. Pumped her full of every designer antibiotic known to man before they were done . . . packed her in ice at one point. For a time she couldn't speak . . . after she went into respiratory distress and they ventilated her . . . but, before that, when she was just delirious, she kept asking for ‘Billy.’ And saying, ‘forgive me.’” Maggie was staring straight ahead as she spoke, her eyes focused on nothing except the footage playing in her mind’s eye of her daughter, pale and weak and burning up with fever, asking and asking for the man who sat silently beside her. “I'd never seen anyone so hot to the touch and yet shivering uncontrollably. My children were simply never prone to high fevers, I suppose,” she mused more to herself than to Will.

“I knew the doctors thought they were losing her to the infection. When they couldn't delay any longer, they took her into surgery and removed the septic part of her intestine, but I knew they weren't hopeful. They wouldn't say that to me, but they told Teddy that she might be beyond saving.” Margaret McHale shook her head in disbelief. “Stalwart Sir Edward McHale,” she said as if announcing him at a diplomatic reception. “They never realized that it was Teddy who wouldn't have survived losing Mackie.”

The sound that came from the figure next to her was more like the noise made by a wounded animal than a human. It was part guttural moan, part stifled cry, with a slight keening pitch that came unbidden from the back of his throat. 

“Billy!” Maggie McHale turned toward her son-in-law. “Dear Lord, I can be an insensitive dolt sometimes . . . just ask my children. I don't need to be talking about this, and you certainly don't need to be hearing about Mackie in Germany . . .”

“Yes!” He cut her off, the word sounding more like a hiss than speech. “Yes,” he repeated more calmly, “yes, I do. I do need to hear about Germany . . . I need to hear every word . . . about every moment that you spent there . . . in that hospital.” Will took a breath to calm himself further. “I need to hear about everything . . . everything that my . . . .” He struggled for the words to express what he was feeling. “. . . my immaturity . . . my intransigence . . . my insanity . . . caused this family.”

Maggie noted that last two words with satisfaction. As upset as he was, Will hadn't distanced himself from her and Ted. He’d said “this family,” not “your family,” she thought with relief. 

“It will not benefit MacKenzie . . . or Charlotte . . . for you to eviscerate yourself with guilt. But alright,” she sighed, looking at the determined expression on his face. “I'll tell you everything that I can recall about Mackie’s injuries and her time in hospital at Landstuhl.” Will had no doubt that Margaret’s recollection would be detained and encyclopedic. 

They talked for over an hour. Maggie answered his questions completely and forthrightly, but watched him carefully as she spoke. Although Will remained stoically unemotional, almost clinical in his pursuit of the facts, Maggie could see that the thought of Mac’s suffering took its toll on him. Finally, when she felt as though her “deposition” was becoming repetitive, and Will had learned enough of what had transpired, Maggie stopped Will’s questioning by saying that she was tired. This was certainly true. After the night before last with Lee and then this, Maggie considered postponing her flight home without telling anyone and checking into an airport hotel to sleep for twenty-four hours.

“You are not responsible for Mackie getting stabbed,” her mother said compassionately.

“You can't possibly believe that,” Will countered. “If I had listened to her . . . just listened to her . . . that morning, or the next day, or in response to one of her emails and voice messages . . . if I'd not run back to New York . . . if I'd just seen her. . . .” He drifted off into his own thoughts and then, returned to the present. “Do you for one moment think that if I'd done any of those things, she would still have been meeting an informant at a Shiite rally on some God-forsaken street in Islamabad?” Will's voice was laced with anger and frustration. Before Maggie could answer, he spoke again, the anger now replaced by sorrow, “she would have been here . . . home,” his eyes darted around the pleasant little sitting room, “taking care of our two-year-old son . . . probably pregnant again with the second one she wants so badly.”

Maggie’s lips thinned in what Will took for agreement. “We all failed,” she said after several moment's consideration, “you, me, Teddy, Mackie . . . all of us . . .”

“But not like I did!” Will interrupted. Lady Ailesbury held up a hand to silence him with a palm-out gesture that reminded Will of photographs of the Queen. 

“We all failed,” she repeated, reaching over and taking his hand in hers. “For each of us, there was a moment . . . more than one, actually . . . when if we had behaved differently, the outcome most likely would have been 100% changed for the better.” Her look was stern, maternal, and this time, Will did not interrupt, although Maggie could see from his expression that he wanted to continue to press the case that he was uniquely responsible for all of Mac’s suffering. “Therefore,” she continued, “I fail to see the utility of any further parsing of respective degrees of culpability.” She smiled. “I know you barristers like to get into that sort of thing, but I've always believed that in family matters, everyone involved usually bears complete responsibility for events.”

To Will’s surprise, Mac’s mother leaned toward him and wrapped her arms around his body. “I can see,” she continued, “what it does to you to watch her tortured by her guilt over the baby’s death.” She paused and released him. “Will, you can not relieve her suffering by taking on all of the responsibility for what happened to your son. Look at me,” she requested softly. “It won't work. It can't. Mackie was his mother. It was her duty to protect her child. Your actions may have made that difficult . . . more difficult than it should have been . . . but Mackie has to learn to accept her failure, just as we all do. Nothing can change that.”

Despite the sorrowful, loving tone of the older woman’s voice, her words produced a blinding white-hot rage that threatened to consume Will. After a second during which his face hardened as his jaw clamped tight, Will jumped to his feet and turned away. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of his psyche, a part of him realized that the intensity of this emotion was totally out of proportion to the circumstances. Employing every bit of self-control he could muster, he put on the face he used on-air to conceal his emotions, and told Maggie that he needed to use the bathroom. 

He had let it go by the time he returned to the room. “I know what you’re saying is true. I know that the better able I am to accept what was and live in what is, the more Mac will heal, and the happier we will be.” He sat back down beside his mother-in-law.

Maggie nodded. “It's not easy.”

“And it's not like we’re miserable all the time,” Will said a little more defensively than he would have liked.

“Of course not.”

“Mostly, we’re just fine.”

“I believe that. I’m sure that telling Teddy and me about William has been very difficult for you both. I only hope . . . believe . . . that sharing that part of Mackie’s life . . . your lives . . . with the people who love you both is a necessary part of the process of healing. I think this secret has taken a terrible toll on Mackie, and that however painful the surfacing of these memories is, there will be peace down the road.” 

Mac’s mother reached out again and gave Will’s hand a squeeze. Then they sat in silence for a while, each lost in thought. Finally, Will cleared his throat and spoke.

“I’m . . . going . . . .” Will gestured toward the master bedroom, “I . . . you know . . . want to be there when she wakes up. I don't want her to be alone.”

Margaret McHale looked him in the eye and their gazes held for a long moment. “You’re a good, good man, Billy McAvoy.” His eyes filled with tears but he didn't speak. Then he swallowed the lump in his throat, smiled slightly in her direction, and left the room.


	26. Happy New Year

They were facing away from each other, talking to other people when they bumped shoulders. Then, turning around to excuse themselves, each was clearly taken aback. MacKenzie recovered first.

“Brian! What a surprise.” What the fuck, Mac thought. What was Brian Brenner doing at the ACN New Year’s Eve Party? True, since Pruitt, it was no longer the intimate gathering at the studio that it had once been. This year, it was being held in a ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria, attended by a large number of media types whom she barely knew, along with ACN employees from the D.C. and LA bureaus, various of Pruitt’s investors, friends, and apparently, also the last man on earth to whom she cared to speak. I suppose Nina Howard’s lurking in here somewhere too, Mac thought to herself. 

“Mac . . . You look . . .” Brenner paused, looking her up and down. “You look . . . unbelievably sexy,” he finished. Mac considered bursting out laughing. Yeah, sexy like a beached whale, maybe. She was a mere two weeks away from her due date, and felt anything but sexy, even though she knew that for some reason she could hardly fathom, she continued to turn Will on. And the dress, which Will designed and had made for her, loosely based on the black dress she’d worn on News Year’s Eve 2011, was the most terrific maternity evening gown she’d ever seen. Looking in the mirror as they’d departed their apartment, she'd concluded that she looked about as good as could be expected, as Wallace, one of her favorite cartoon characters, would say.

Had anyone but Brian told her that she looked sexy, she would have laughed appreciatively at the absurdity of being complimented on her sex appeal in her present condition. But this was Brian Brenner, and nothing about the man was to be encouraged or trusted. So, she didn't laugh. Rather, she stood with her hands on each side of her protruding belly, and eyed him suspiciously. 

For a long moment, they just stood there, facing each other in a frozen tableau. Finally, Brenner spoke again. “I guess he came back,” he said, gesturing to Mac’s heavily pregnant form and referring to a conversation they had had about Will when Brian was dogging her steps while writing the ill-fated New York Magazine article on News Night 2.0.

Mac’s features softened, and her lips curled into the slight smile that always crept into Mac’s eyes anytime that she thought of or spoke about her husband. “Yes,” she said, feeling strangely shy. “Actually, I think it would be more accurate to say that he never really left.”

 

Across the room, Will’s attention was trained intently on his wife’s conversation, while he too eyed Brenner suspiciously. But when he started to take a step toward Mac and Brian, he felt a restraining hand on his arm, and a soft voice at his ear. 

“Hey, Bro, talk to me.”

“Sloan, hi. Have you got any idea who let that son-of-a-bitch into this party?”

“Absolutely none. But I’d put my money on Pruitt. Just a little more ‘disruption’ for the fun of it. And to see how you and Mac react. So, my advice is: don't react. Let Mac handle him and stay out of it.”

Will sighed, which Sloan took as acknowledgment that she was right. “But, I'd like to go over there and push his face in.”

“Surely you’re not still upset about that stupid article,” Sloan said, shaking her head. “Besides, without it, who knows if all those kids would have organized themselves into the Greater Fools. You’ve got the biggest following of any news show on college campuses. Certainly, without the article, they’d never have come up with that catchy name. . .”

“He hit her, you know,” Will interrupted, as his fists clenched involuntarily at the thought.

“When? When he was here doing the article?”

“No. Back when they were a couple.”

“You mean he beat her? I don't believe that Mac would stay with any man who beat her. Emotional abuse, yes. Mac demonstrated an amazing capacity to accept that.” Sloan gave a snorting little laugh that made Will feel the not too subtle message there. “But physical violence? No way.”

“She says it was only once . . . when she told him that their . . . reconciliation . . . was over. That she was in love with me.”

Sloan looked over to where Mac was still engaged in a dialog with Brenner. “Well, they’re in a room with two hundred other people, including you. I don't think you need to be concerned about him taking a swing at her.”

“It's just that Kenz looks so uncomfortable.” 

Sloan gaped at him, open mouthed for several seconds before speaking.

“Seriously, Will? She looks uncomfortable? Really? Where the fuck were you three years ago when Brenner was making Mac’s life a living hell? He was in her face every goddamned day, taunting her about her loyalty to you, speculating about how much you must hate her to have selected him of all people to write about a show you and she were doing together. Reminding her just how hopeless and lonely her life was, devoted to a man who would never forgive her and never love her again. THAT was discomfort, Bro. From where I'm standing, this . . .” Sloan gestured toward Mac’s conversation with Brenner, “looks like she's having a picnic in the park.”

Will closed his eyes. “Christ,” he whispered softly. What had he been doing selecting Brenner to write the article. That his own reaction to it had nearly resulted in his death seemed narcissistic and of little penance. He’d known that Mac would hate having Brenner around when he'd picked him. He'd known that she cared about him, loved him, but he couldn't stop punishing her. He knew that she would view his selection of her ex-lover to chronicle their show as an act of hostility, anger and aggression, if not outright hatred. And yet, he'd done it.

Will remembered saying to her that he'd put Brenner in the newsroom to give her a “side-by-side comparison,” and that statement had been so spontaneous that he didn't need Habib to tell him it held some truth. But there had been more. He had wanted to see Mac barely tolerating Brenner. He'd needed to see her rejecting Brenner with his own eyes. He'd reveled in seeing her face pinched and tense anytime Brenner was speaking to her. It had been like an exorcism of sorts, a way of replacing the image of their naked bodies twined together that Will had carried for all the years when she was gone. “Christ,” he whispered again, shaking his head. He had been loathsome to her, to this woman he had always loved beyond words.

“Come on, Bro.” Sloan’s voice was liquid and loving, as she reached MacKenzie-like for his hand. “Come buy me a drink.”

 

“You can't imagine how much I wish that baby was mine,” Brenner was saying, continuing the conversation despite Mac’s obvious desire to end it. Mac searched his face, but saw only sincerity in his eyes and on his features. Where on Earth was this coming from, she wondered and why now. Being at a loss for a reply and not really wanting to encourage this line of discussion further, she fell back on her upbringing. 

“I'll take that as a compliment,” she replied, smiling, but with a finality in her tone that signaled a change of subject.

“I did love you, Mac. I . . . still do.”

Part of her felt automatically like she should say that she had once loved him too, but something stopped her. Had she loved Brian? She had certainly convinced herself that she did. Mac involuntarily gave a tiny shudder and unconsciously moved her hand protectively around her enormous belly, as she determinedly pushed away thoughts of the consequences of her refusal to give up on the idea that she was in love with Brenner. But really loved Brian? No. She didn't think she had ever loved Brian. Certainly not as she understood and experienced loving Will. 

Had Brenner loved her? She supposed that he had tried, and felt something . . . power or control that he had mistaken for love. Perhaps he had even succeeded in loving her within the limits of his narcissistic capacity to care for another human being. But if there was one thing that MacKenzie McAvoy knew deep in her bones, it was what it felt like to be loved and cherished by a partner, a spouse, a soulmate who was nurturing and supportive. Brian had never, even in their best days, been any of those things.

“It wouldn't have worked between us,” was all she said. 

The subject did change, and Brian carried on the conversation talking about himself, most of which Mac half tuned out. She came back when she realized that Brenner had switched the subject from his latest gig to the Greater Fools. He was telling her about the “potential” to exploit the loosely organized movement of college students that had sprung up spontaneously to support Will during his incarceration. Brian told her that he was not alone thinking this, that he'd heard from some fairly highly placed people in political circles, that power brokers in the Republican Party had been observing what was going on and had decided that Greater Fools could be turned into a powerful grass-roots support organization if Will ever developed political aspirations. “So if you ever find yourself the First Lady of the land, you’ll have me to thank,” Brian concluded, giving her the cocky smile she had come to despise.

“Excuse me,” Mac responded, anger flashing in her eyes. “You intended to ridicule him with that appellation. In fact, you were so intent on doing damage to the man I left you for that you were willing to denigrate everything that we are attempting to do at News Night, and, worse, you did it without any evaluation of the worth of our efforts. To take Will down, you were willing to make a laughing stock out of concepts of journalistic integrity, that I was once foolish enough to assume you believed in as well as I did. That inadvertently you wrote something about Will that’s inspired young journalists is to Will’s credit, not yours.”

Suddenly, Mac was tired, tired of the conversation with Brian, and tired of standing on her feet in shoes that were becoming increasingly uncomfortable. She wanted to feel Will’s arms around her and look into her husband’s eyes while he asked her if she was alright. 

“I really need to mingle,” she said with as bright a smile as she could manage. “Goes with the job description,” she added, unable to resist making a reference to the fact that she was the President of a major cable news network while he had become an increasingly irrelevant free-lance writer. And, with that and a final, “stay safe,” Mac turned and walked away.

She wanted Will. Mac was amazed at the need to be near her husband, touching some part of him, that she had developed in the waning days of her pregnancy. Or, she mused looking down her body, would the term waxing days of pregnancy be more fitting? In any event, she knew just where she was going. Mac crossed the room to the small group standing to the right of one of the many bars that had been set up in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria. 

Her arms went around Will’s waist almost before he saw her. She pressed her body to his, sandwiching their unborn daughter between them. Turning her face into his chest, she breathed in the comfort of his presence, and let the tension that had built during her conversation with Brenner slip away. 

“You okay?” Will whispered. Mac nodded, keeping her face pressed against him.

“He doesn't know. Nina didn't lie. I'm sure of it.” The words were whispered just loud enough for Will to hear.

Finishing what he'd been saying to Don Keifer, Will planted a kiss on the top of his wife’s head. Then, resting his chin where he'd kissed her, he smiled at Sloan, as he felt MacKenzie sigh with contentment.

“This is quite a bit of PDA for you, Madam President,” Jim Harper teased, when he and Maggie Jordan joined the group. Never one for great sloppy public kisses, Mac had become as circumspect as the Queen about touching her husband in public since assuming the presidency of the network. 

Mac turned her head so that she could see them, but left it resting on Will’s chest. “I know,” she chuckled, “I'm sort of an idiot on the subject. As Rebecca once reminded me, everyone over the age of nine knows exactly how this baby got in here.” Mac looked down her body and smiled at the absurdity of her physical condition.

“So what did Mr. Hatchet Job have to say?” Don asked, giving voice to the question in Will’s and Sloan’s minds as well.

“He told me that I look sexy,” Mac replied, moving her head and shoulders in a coquettish gesture. 

“The nerve of that man!” Sloan rejoined jokingly. Then she looked Mac up and down as if she were studying a stock market report. “You know, Kenzie, he's right. You do look sexy. I really didn't think that anyone could be that . . . this . . . .”

“Enormous? Gargantuan?”

“No! Just . . . well . . . with child, I guess, and still be . . . alluring.”

“Alluring? God!” Mac laughed. “I can't imagine luring anyone in my present condition . . . except maybe him.” She looked up at Will.

“I like her jokes,” he deadpanned to the others. “And her legs. And her eyes. And her smile. And her . . . .”

“We'd better stop this while this list is still G Rated,” Maggie Jordan broke in. “But Mac,” she continued, “you do look great . . . really beautiful. You might be the fittest pregnant woman I've ever seen. You’re setting a pretty high bar for the rest of us to aspire to.”

Will looked at his wife. She did look beautiful . . . and happy and relaxed, which he considered something of a miracle after the “Season of Disclosure” they had passed through since Mac’s mother’s visit. 

Shortly after Margaret McHale returned to the U.K., Mac decided that she needed to tell Jim and Sloan about William. Mac had talked to each of them alone, each time at a restaurant where Will had secured her a secluded table in a quiet corner. She had chosen a public place, rather than their apartment, he knew, because she thought that it would inspire her to keep her emotions in check.

Jim, of course, already suspected that the grief and nightmares which had plagued her in the Middle East had to do with a baby, undoubtedly Will’s child, that she had either miscarried or aborted. Knowing this, Mac had opened the conversation by telling Jim that he was no longer practically the only person on the planet other than Daniel Shivitz and Morton Husby who knew that she'd been pregnant before. “Who the fuck is Morton Husby?” Jim had asked. 

“An OB-GYN in D.C.,” she'd answered, and Jim had once again laughed at the precision of Mac’s mind and language. After that, he'd listened silently as she'd described what she could recall and believed she dreamed from memory about William’s birth and death, the shaking of Jim’s hand as he reached for the water glass the only evidence of the story’s effect on him. Walking back to ACN, Jim had put his arm around Mac’s shoulders, an uncharacteristically bold move for him, and told her that she was amazing and would always inspire him with her courage and fortitude, and that no one deserved happiness more than she.

Sloan’s reaction was on the other end of the emotional scale, pretty much where Mac expected it to be. Both women had repeatedly wiped tears from their eyes, and twice Sloan had emitted a high-pitched whine of pain that attracted the attention of nearby diners. Sloan had tied down the sequence of events with mathematical precision. When Mac told her about Charlie Skinner’s going to D.C. and unsuccessfully trying to connect with her, Sloan expressed incredulity that Will could have said things to Charlie that made the older man question Will’s version of events without hearing himself. As they were about to get up from the table, Mac suddenly reached out and grabbed Sloan’s hand. “Sloan, when you see Will,” Mac began, and saw Sloan’s eyes widen and then harden with the realization that she would soon be seeing Will, “Sloan, please . . . please, you must be kind.”

“What?” Confusion now clouded Sloan’s expression.

“Billy . . . He's suffering more than you can imagine. Anything that you might want to say to him, he's said it about himself and thought worse.” Mac swallowed hard, fighting once again to rein in her emotions. “What I'm trying to say is that he needs your understanding. He needs to know that he's still your brother.”

Will had been pacing his office for most of the time that Mac had been having lunch with Sloan, preparing himself for the onslaught of condemnation that he was certain was coming his way when his “little sister” returned to the studio. Well deserved condemnation, he knew, but that didn't take away any of the dread. He wouldn't even try to make her understand why he'd done the things he had, he decided. Certainly, he wouldn't try to justify himself, no matter what she'd say. Christ! He sat down on his sofa and ran a hand through his hair. Even he didn't really understand it, and there was no justification for his behavior. 

He'd been replaying in his mind the second night he’d spent in the hotel after walking out on Mac, the night he'd called Rosemary, the night that in his drunken stupor, he'd let himself remember that he suspected Mac might be pregnant. He’d called to talk to his sister, and ask her if he should go back and find Mac, if he should forgive her, but instead of the wise counsel he'd sought, Will had bared his soul to a man who’d lived his entire adult life on hate and cheap whiskey. 

A knock on the glass office door brought Will out of his reverie. The door opened just as he was about to tell the knocker to come in. As Sloan crossed the threshold, Will stood to greet her. They stayed like that for several seconds, staring at each other, neither speaking. Then, Sloan launched herself into his arms.

“Oh, God. Oh, Bro,” she whispered, as his arms came around her and the tears she’d mostly suppressed talking to Mac poured out. “I'm so sorry . . . so sorry . . . for Kenzie . . . for you.”

This was as far from his expectation as anything could be and he was initially taken aback. Then, he wrapped his arms around her and simply held on for dear life.

Finally, he spoke. “Waiting . . . knowing she was telling you . . . . I expected you to storm in here with guns blazing.” He gave a sheepish shrug.

“No one blames you, Will,” Sloan said, still hugging him fiercely. He pulled back slightly to look at her. “Well,” she continued tentatively, her brows knitting in a quintessentially Sloan gesture of contemplation, “that's not exactly true. We all blame you, Bro. But we love you.” She kissed his cheek. “You are so loved, ya know that?”

It was such a Sloan gesture to tell him that everyone blamed him for mistreating Mac, so honest and so different from the expected social norm that they both started to laugh, the sound a bit nervous and slightly blubbery through their tears. 

“We all see you differently now,” she continued, “from the way we did before Kenzie came along and told us that you were kind and loving and generous, and, well, made us see you through her eyes.”

“Not Jim.”

“He does now. He's like your staunchest supporter. And, besides, Jim’s a special case so it took him a little longer to come around than the rest of us. I mean, you can't really fault him for hating you. He was the closest to her when you wouldn't forgive her and were going to fire her at the end of each week.” Sloan snickered at the absurdity of Will’s firing Mac. Then, turning serious, she lowered her gaze to the floor. “And, well, he was there . . . you know . . . after . . . . He . . . .”

“Kept her alive after the baby,” Will finished before Sloan could decide exactly how she wanted to put it.

“Yeah. It was hard to watch her suffer, I know. All I did was get her home on the day that she saw the Page Six picture of you holding hands with Nina, and it was everything I could do for the next few days . . . weeks . . . months to force myself sit beside you at the anchor desk.” She smiled an ironic little smile. “But you’ve more than made up for it. Kenzie says that if the network ever tanks, she's going to rent you out as a professional pregnancy companion.”

She thought that would make him smile, but it didn't. Rather, he studied her seriously for a long time before he spoke.

“I will never forgive myself,” Will whispered.

“For what?”

For . . . all of it . . . for any of it . . . for threatening to fire her . . . for Nina . . . but most of all . . . for not listening . . . not being willing . . . able . . . to hear her or see her . . . for leaving her.”

“You have to.”

Will looked at Sloan blankly. “Why?” he asked.

“Because you have to be somebody’s husband. Hers. And you have to be somebody’s father. Charlotte’s. To do that properly, you need to forgive yourself.” Sloan paused, considering. “And you have to forgive Kenzie, too.”

“What!?” Will looked aghast as shock quickly gave way to anger and defensiveness. “What are you talking about?” he asked more belligerently than he'd intended, but the idea that Mac could have any part of the blame for what happened to William roiled in his gut. “What could I possibly need to forgive Mac for?”

Sloan’s gaze never wavered. “For not telling you she was pregnant . . . .” Sloan held up a hand as he started to protest. “Just hear me out. I know you shut her down and wouldn't take her calls or read the emails, but the subject lines displayed on your Blackberry and your computer, right?” He gave a quick head bob of concession. “You think one saying, ‘I'm six months pregnant’ might have made you sit up and take notice? Hell, she could have come to New York and camped out on your doorstep. Demanded a cheek swab and matched your DNA up to the amnio results if you’d denied it was yours.” Sloan sighed. “She needs to be forgiven for not telling her parents, or her brothers or sisters. And for going to Afghanistan.” Sloan rolled her eyes. “I mean, in what alternate universe was taking her pregnant self off to a war zone a good idea?”

Telling her sister had been the hardest for Mac, Will knew. Catherine Diana Caroline McHale had arrived on their doorstep with about four hours notice two days after Christmas, bearing gifts for Mac, Will and Charlotte. Mac hadn't planned to tell her, but each time Cat referred to Charlie as their first child and Mac said nothing, Will knew Mac felt it was a denial of William. Will watched his wife’s guilt build until she couldn't stand it any longer. As it happened, on Cat’s last night at their apartment, Will and Reese had tickets to take Beau and Ned to a Knick’s game. “No time like the present,” Mac had whispered gamely to Will as she’d kissed him good-bye and shooed him out the door.

“Stop! Stop it, Cat! Please . . . . Please . . . ,” MacKenzie’s voice broke, and the sob that ripped from her throat brought her sister up short and stopped the torrent of accusations that had been pouring forth since the import of Mac’s words had sunk in. “My God, Cat. Don't you think I regret not telling you . . . not telling Mum . . . going to Afghanistan? Don't you think I . . . will . . . continue . . . to regret it . . . with every . . . breath I take . . . until the day I die?” Mac fought to get her breathing and emotions under control.

Cat stared at her sister, at the lock of hair that had fallen over Mackie’s face, and saw the tears and pain in Mac’s eyes as she hunched forward and wrapped her arms across her body. Cat had been so hurt to think that MacKenzie could have failed to confide in her that she'd been unable to think of anything else, and it had come out in probing questions, belligerence, anger and recriminations. 

“Oh God, I'm a selfish git. Mackie, I'm sorry. Come here,” Cat said moving closer to her sister and taking Mac into her arms. “I'm not angry, not really. I'd have been there for you, you know that. You could have told me . . . . Bollocks! I’m making this worse, aren't I?” Gently, Cat tucked the lock of hair behind Mac’s ear.

Mac shook her head. “No. No. I know,” she sobbed, “I know I could have . . . trusted you. It wasn't you. It was me.” As the trite break-up line registered on both of them, they smiled at each other through their tears.

Cat was out with friends and Mac asleep on the den sofa when Will returned from the game. He woke her with kisses and told her it was time for bed. 

“How did it go?” he asked as they arrived in their bedroom, although Mac’s pale complexion and drawn features told him that it had been exhausting for his wife. 

“How do you bloody well think it went?” Mac responded with a deep sigh, sinking down onto the bed. “She went ballistic . . . .”

“Ballistic!?” This was not the answer Will had been expecting. “What do you mean, ballistic?”

“She was upset, hurt, angry . . . .”

“Why?”

“Why? My God, Billy,” Mac said, rising from the bed and beginning to pace. “She's my sister and I’ve lived with this for six . . . seven . . . years and didn't tell her!” Mac looked at him as though only a lunatic could fail to understand Cat’s emotions. “I don't know how I'd react . . . what I'd say or do . . . if I suddenly found out that she'd not told me when she'd been pregnant, sick, terrified and abandoned by the baby’s father . . . .”

Mac froze, all color and expression draining from her already pale face. “Billy . . . I . . . I didn't mean . . . .”

“Shush, sweetheart.” He stepped over to her, gently taking a lock of her hair in his fingertips and placing it behind her ear before cupping her chin and turning her face up to meet his lips. “Do you think I don't know what I did to you,” he asked when they broke from the kiss. “I know and I regret it all and I don't know why you’ve forgiven me, but that you have is all the salvation that I need.”

 

“What are you thinking about?” Mac paused, looking at her husband lost in thought and surrounded by the increasingly rowdy crowd waiting for mid-night. “Billy? Earth to McAvoy. Come in, McAvoy.”

“Huh?” 

“Time to go home. It's almost ten, and I'm not going to make it til mid-night.”

“Want to stop off at my office?” He whispered the rest of the invitation into his wife’s ear.

“Seriously? Are you joking?”

“Well, it's New Year’s Eve and you know me, I'm a stickler for tradition.”

“I’m nine months pregnant and you want a shag in your office washroom?” She stared at him in amused disbelief.

“Don't you see, it's the perfect cover. If anyone shows up, they'd never suspect that’s what we’re doing.”

She laughed heartily. “Well, you’ve got me there, but I highly doubt that there’s enough room for the both of us, or I should say, the three of us to turn around let alone engage in any more strenuous activity.” 

He pretended to be mulling this obstacle over in his mind. “You may have a point,” he conceded at length. “So, home it is.”

“Home it is,” MacKenzie agreed. “Happy New Year, Billy.”

“They just keep getting better, don't they?”

“They do indeed.”


	27. A Family of Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A chapter about labor finished on Labor Day

Will started to jump from the car before the wheels stopped turning. “For Christ’s sake, let me stop the damned car!” 

“Okay. Okay.” Will breathed the words in shallow, rapid gasps. He felt his heart racing as adrenalin coursed through his system. “It’s just . . . .” This was Mac’s driver. New in the last few months, months during which she’d been arriving and departing the studio later and earlier than he, so Will barely knew the man.

“I know. I know. I've got two,” responded the driver, a large black man in his early forties, who, Will suddenly realized, had probably been selected for the job personally by Lonny, the new Head of Security at AWM. Will wondered how it had escaped his attention until that moment that Leona's insistence on Pruitt’s purchase contract including a ten-year lease of one of the AWM vehicles for ACN’s President had been her way of keeping control of some aspect of protecting Mac’s safety, well, Charlie’s at the time, but the point was the same.

“These things take a while,” Will heard the driver saying. “If she was speaking calmly to you like you said before we left, you’ve got time to get up there and then time to wait. Take a couple of deep breaths. You’ll live longer,” he added, as Mac’s SUV, AWM 4, glided up to the entrance of Beth Israel Medical Center. 

“Yeah,” Will agreed, forcing himself to get out of the back seat like a normal person, rather than running like a screaming idiot, which was what he felt like doing. “Thanks.”

“Oh, Mr. McAvoy . . . “ The words caught Will just as the door was closing.

“Yeah?”

“Good luck. And, tell Mac . . . uh, Ms. Mc . . . I mean, Mrs. McAvoy . . . good luck from me.”

Will nodded and smiled. Of course, his wife, the child of privilege beyond most people’s imagining, would insist that her driver call her by her nickname.

Walking through the hospital lobby, Will pulled out his phone and dialed Catherine Barrington. She directed him to the Maternity Floor and said she would meet him when he got off of the elevator. However, instead of Dr. Barrington, Reese Lansing stood in the hallway when the elevator door parted.

“Thank God, you’re here.”

“Where is she?” Will asked by way of greeting.

“Down here,” Reese answered, turning around and starting down the hall. “This place is a bit creepy,” he said over his shoulder to Will. “Mac’s room looks like the Ritz-Carlton I stayed in last month. As they arrived at Room 10-206, Will pushed past Reese and entered. 

The room’s décor was the last thing Will noticed. All he could see has his wife. Mac, dressed in a hospital gown with her hair pulled back in a pony-tail, stood, leaning over with her forearms resting on the bed. She had a nebulizer mask over her mouth and nose, it's bubbly sound mixing with the strains of Van Morrison’s “Brown-eyed Girl” coming from her phone on the bedside table. Beside her, rubbing her back stood Leona Lansing. In contrast to Mac, Leona was fully made up, beautifully coiffed and dressed in an Alexander McQueen cocktail dress and two-inch Bruno Magali pumps. 

“You called your mother?” Will turned to Reese, who had followed him into the room.

“Hey, man, I did really well for a long time,” Reese protested, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender, “but I'm kind of out of my element here.”

Will hadn't bothered to listen to the explanation. He had crossed the room in an instant and was next to Mac, asking if she was okay and if she was having trouble breathing.

“Not really,” she replied, taking the mask off of her face. “I'm perfectly fine. Jonathan just decided to do it to get me ready for . . . everything. He said I should think of it like an athlete preparing for a marathon. I'm not sure I appreciate the analogy. But I don't think a twisted ankle is likely in this situation. You know . . . .” Her words cut off as another contraction started to claim her. 

Never one to take his wife’s assurances about her health at face value, Will glanced at Leona and tapping his chest, raised his eyebrows in a questioning gesture. Lee shook her head, made a dismissive gesture with her hand and mouthed the word, “she’s fine.” It wasn't exactly true, but it would do and there was no reason to escalate the level of Will’s concern, which, she could see from the slightly crazed look in his eyes, was already threatening to go off the chart. And Mac had not exactly lied. The pulmonologist had said something about childbirth being like running a marathon, and that there was no shame in having a breathing treatment just like an athlete before strenuous exercise. But he had not simply spontaneously appeared in the room. He'd been called in after the labor-and-delivery nurse had witnessed two contractions, and motivated by Mac’s coughing and stertorous breathing, had consulted her chart.

Will seemed to accept Leona’s assessment, or was too distracted to consider it further. As the contraction built, Mac’s body tensed, and a low moan began in her throat and steadily rose to become a high-pitched whine. Her eyes closed, her lips pulled back in a grimace. Her hands reached for Will, and she clutched his arms hard enough to leave a bruise. As the contraction peaked, she sucked in air and stopped breathing.

“Come on, Mac, sweetheart, breathe,” Leona commanded gently, putting the nebulizer mask back in place, and intensifying the circles she was rubbing across Mac’s back. “That’s it. Nice and slow. Three short breaths in. One long breath out. It’ll hurt less if you keep breathing.”

Mac nodded and did her best to breathe slowly and rhythmically as the pain began to recede. “Oh, God!” Mac puffed out the words, looking up into Will’s concerned eyes. “That . . . was a good one. They’re definitely . . . getting . . . stronger. I'm so glad . . . so glad you’re here, Billy.”

For some unknown reason, Will looked at Leona as Mac spoke. “Me too,” she said smiling brightly. “Although to be perfectly honest, I rather wish you’d been Lonny with my change of clothes.” She looked down ruefully at her attire. “I'd have skipped the Guggenheim Gala if I'd know the after- party was going to be such fun.”

"You've got the Head of Security fetching your bag?" Will asked, shaking his head.

"Oh, he doesn't mind. He wants to be here, and you know Lonny, he needed an excuse," Leona responded, dismissing Will's concerns that Lonny would feel like an errand-boy. And, she was right, Will mused, marveling once more at Leona's ability to perceive what people need and provide it to them.

Mac went through two more contractions before the door opened and Reese entered carrying three bags, two, a small Vuitton duffle and a Tommy Bahama canvas grip, that Will recognized as belonging to his wife and himself, and one, a Tod’s leather tote, that he had never seen before.

“Oh, thank God,” Mac and Leona exclaimed in unison. 

“I'm going to use the bathroom,” Lee announced grabbing the Tod’s bag from her son. “You,” she continued, looking at Will, “can help her change in here.”

“I'll be outside,” Reese said, beating a hasty retreat to the door. “Oh, yeah, Sloan called. She's on her way.”

“The more the merrier,” Mac replied brightly, unzipping her bag.

“You want to change your clothes?” Will asked, a little bewildered.

“Well,” Mac responded, smoothing the skirt of the floral patterned hospital gown, “I know this is what Dior is showing as the linchpin of its Spring line, but I just don't think it's really me.” She gave him her best crinkly-eyed smile, and pulled an oversized sleep-shirt out of her bag, and held it up for him to see. It had the words, “A McAvoy-McHale Production” on the front under the ACN logo. 

“Sloan,” they each said simultaneously, grinning. 

They had no sooner gotten MacKenzie out of the gown and into the shirt when the next contraction began to build. Mac’s breathing became ragged and she began to make a keening sound between gasps. Still standing, she doubled over and put her head down on the bed, her eyes closed and her features contorted with agony. Will stared at her, mesmerized by the transformation in his wife that was being wrought by the pain. 

She had told him, he remembered, that in Kabul, she had chewed through a pillow, trying not to disturb the other guests on her floor. “Of course, being the Intercontinental, even in Afghanistan, the pillows were down,” she had said, chuckling. “There were feathers everywhere. I was sputtering and spitting.” He had laughed. God help him, he had laughed. Now, the reality of what she had gone through overwhelmed him. How had he allowed it to happen? Had he been more of a man, more certain of himself, believing himself to be the equal of anyone, he would have listened to her, known the truth, seen, understood, and acted.

Mac screamed at the height of the contraction, a guttural, pain wracked, shriek. Suddenly, he didn't want children. Not if this was the price to be paid. He just wanted MacKenzie, his MacKenzie, freed of this pain.

“Will! Will! McAvoy! For Christ’s sake, get in the game!” The voice was Leona’s, and Will realized that he hadn't even noticed her come out of the bathroom. Dressed in jeans, a t-shirt, and ballet flats, she was holding onto MacKenzie, whose knees seemed to have buckled. “Help me get her onto the bed,” Lee ordered. 

He lifted Mac into bed, where she lay on her side, panting as the pain subsided. He curled beside her, cradling her body with his, stroking the damp hair off of her forehead, wishing for all the world that he could just make this stop. 

“Damn . . . that . . . was another good one.” Mac moved in his arms until she could see his face. To his amazement, she was smiling. 

“You don't mind?” he heard himself ask, incredulously.

“Mind what?” She looked genuinely confused.

“This . . . the pain.”

“Oh,” she replied, as if considering the question for the first time. “This is labor and delivery, Billy. This is how mammals come into the world. It's not really up for debate. And no, if this is what it takes to have our baby, then I guess I don't mind. I mean, do I wish that Mother Nature had seen fit to put a few less nerve endings into the vagina and cervix . . . “

“Bite your tongue, woman!” Leona interrupted. “This is . . . what? Twelve . . . eighteen hours once, twice, maybe three times in a lifetime. Orgasms are forever.” Then, to Will’s amazement, both women burst out laughing. 

The next contraction seemed to Will to be more intense that the one before it, but now he was very much in the game, holding Mac, stroking the length of her body, telling her that she was beautiful and marvelous and the bravest person he had ever known. When the pain subsided, Leona announced that she was going to go and find “someone to check you out, Mac, ‘cause you have to have made progress on this last bunch of contractions.” She returned with both Catherine Barrington and Daniel Shivitz in tow. They were followed shortly by Sloan Sabbith.

As Leona had suspected, both doctors agreed that Mac was making good progress, dilating right on schedule. Shivitz told Mac that it was time to “reign her in a bit,” explaining to Will that Mac had spent the first few hours in labor roaming the halls and soaking in a warm bath. Now, however, he wanted to put the fetal monitor on, and get an IV shunt inserted into her arm while there was enough time between contractions for her to hold still. He also offered one last chance to have an epidural, which Mac predictably declined. Soon, the sound of Charlotte’s strong and steady heartbeat competed with the music from the labor playlist that Mac and “the Nightbird” had put together on her phone, now hooked up to the speaker that had been packed into her hospital bag.

Sloan and Leona took turns feeding Mac ice chips, putting cold washcloths on her face and neck, and coaching her to take steady breaths, three short inhales through her nose, followed by one long exhale. Since Mac preferred to weather the contractions on all fours rather than on her back, Will’s job was to hold her up against him and whisper words of encouragement that he was no longer certain that she could hear. After what seemed to be an eternity, Catherine announced that the baby's head was crowning.

“Okay, Mac. This is the hard part,” Dr. Barrington said in a soothing voice.

“The hard . . . part’s coming . . . up?” Mac panted as if unable to believe the words. “You’re telling me . . . this . . . has been . . . the easy part?” She sagged against Will.

Catherine smiled.

“Piece ‘o cake, right, McMac?” Leona joked. 

“The next few contractions are going to feel like burning but you need to fight the urge to push” the doctor continued, becoming serious when she saw that the next one was starting. “Resisting the desire to push might be easier lying down,” she said, gesturing to Will to move his wife onto her back. “Well, not lying completely down. Just leaning against Will.”

They went through the next three contractions that way. Catherine instructed Will to run his hands along the sides of Mac’s belly while encouraging her to relax. The muscles under his fingers felt as hard as ribbons of steel. Doctor Shivitz, who had another patient laboring in the room next door, came in during the height of the fourth contraction for which Mac was on her back.

“Danny! Danny!” Mac shrieked, reaching for him. He grabbed her outstretched hand. Will saw the delivery nurse raise an eyebrow in surprise and then school her face in a neutral expression.

“What? I'm here. I'm right here.”

“I . . . I don't . . . remember. . . this . . . “

“No. No. You never got to 10 centimeters. . . .”

“Dan,” Catherine Barrington interrupted him. “Come here and tell me what you think.”

Shivitz kept ahold of Mac’s hand and moved down her body to stand beside Barrington. Then he smiled at Mac and Will. “I think it's showtime,” he said brightly. “Ready to meet your daughter, guys?”

Mac turned to look at Will, then, Leona and Sloan, her eyes shinning and her lips both smiling and holding back tears. She nodded at Catherine and Danny, just as her face started to register the build up to another contraction.

“Ok, Mrs. McAvoy,” he said, “push to your heart’s content.”

Mac elected to get back on her hands and knees. About an hour later, this provided her with the most incredible moment of her life, the sight of her daughter emerging from her body and sliding into Will's waiting hands. 

“Billy . . . Billy . . . “ she repeated, the wonder in her voice mirrored on his face.

Then Sloan, who looked to be in shock, and Leona, who was crying along with Will, gently eased Mac down into a reclining position, so the tiny squirming newborn could be placed on her mother’s naked belly. At Catherine's urging Will kept his hands on Charlotte's back. To the amazement of everyone, except possibly the medical staff, Charlotte began to move, crawl really, up her mother’s body.

“What’s going on?” Mac asked before Will could speak.

“It's a reflex,” Dan volunteered, “or maybe a primordial instinct to seek nourishment. No one’s really sure because for so long modern medicine had us cutting the cord in the first few seconds after birth, and then rushing the baby off to be cleaned up and evaluated. Midwives used to talk about babies crawling up to feed before the placenta came out or the cord was cut, but most doctors dismissed it as an old wives’ tale.”

“The midwives thought it was a sign of strength and good health,” Catherine volunteered, “and this one certainly proves them right. She's beautiful, Mac.”

“Of course, she is,” Leona chimed in. “Look at her mother.”

The rest of the delivery went by in a blur for Will, who couldn't take his eyes off of his wife and daughter. The cord stopped pulsing, and Leona was given the honor of cutting it. There were some tense moments when Mac started bleeding profusely while delivering the placenta, but aware of Mac’s history of postpartum hemorrhaging, Daniel and Catherine were prepared, and fairly quickly got it under control. Charlotte was tested and cleaned up. Reese, Don, Lonny and Jim all came in briefly to admire “Little Charlie,” as they’d started calling the baby, and to congratulate Mac and Will. Mac, Charlotte and Will skyped briefly with her parents, sisters, brother and his wife. Then, everyone departed and for the first time since Charlotte had left her mother’s body, the McAvoy’s were alone.

Will lay on the bed cradling Mac while Charlotte nursed. He watched as Mac’s eyelids grew heavy and her vision unfocused. She was asleep when the nurse came in and quietly lifted the baby out of her arms.

“You should sleep too,” the nurse whispered to Will. He nodded and closed his eyes, but a short time later, he found himself awake. When sleep didn't return within a few minutes, he got up, careful not to disturb Mac. He looked through his bag for something to read but he'd neglected to put in either a book or his Kindle. He picked up Mac’s bag to see if she'd put in a book, which of course, she had. It was one of Mac’s “escapist” thrillers, the latest in a series about a fictional Israeli intelligence operative. Not really his taste, but any port in a storm. He pulled it out and walking to the other end of the luxurious room, settled himself into one of the comfortable overstuffed chairs that bordered the gas fireplace, and put his feet up on the ottoman. Amazing, he mused, what knowing both Dan Shivitz and Leona Lansing could get you around here.

He opened the book and was turning to the first page when a folded piece of paper fell out. He picked it up and noticed that it was actually two pieces of Mac’ linen stationary. Curious, he unfolded it and, seeing his wife's distinctive, precise cursive, began to read.

“My precious William,” it began. For a second, Will thought that he had found a letter Mac had written to him, but that didn't seem right. “Precious” wasn't a word that he'd expect Mac to apply to him. She'd told him that she “treasured” him, but “precious” sounded out of character, and she’d never really called him, “William.” Oh, maybe once or twice back in D.C. when he'd been resisting her direction on the show, but not frequently, and never since . . . . He read on:

“I have just finished packing the bag that I will take to hospital with me when I go to give birth to your sister. Daddy will be there this time and nothing bad is going to happen. I'm so sorry for what I did to you. If I hadn't taken you to Afghanistan, if I'd taken better care of us, if I'd gone to New York, if I'd told your grandparents or your Aunt Cat about you, everything would be different. You would be six now. Six. Old enough to be curious about your sister, and, I imagine, like Neddy, you’d be worldly enough to be both fascinated and a little put off by the latter stages of my pregnancy. I wish you could know Ned. You two would be great mates, I'm sure. I wish. Oh, God, Baby, I wish so many things. 

“When you died . . . “ Will stopped reading and looked at Charlotte, who after nursing herself into a stupor, slept placidly in the little clear plastic tray on a wheeled stand that his wife called a “cot.” Then, his eyes turned to the bed where Kenz dosed, her face as peaceful and unlined as her daughter’s. His emotions swirled pain with joy. His girls, the delivery nurse, an older Jewish woman with a thick Bronx accent, had called them. Then, he turned back to the letter his wife had written to their son.

“When you died, when I lost you, I descended into an abyss of guilt and regret and pain, loneliness and grief, a blackness of the mind that was deeper and darker than anything I had ever known. I was certain that I would never emerge, never really live again. I didn't expect that my life would go on for very long after that, and I suppose it’s true that I didn't much care. Maybe I was suicidal. I don't really know.”

Will stood abruptly, and began to pace the room, the paper rustling in his hand as he walked, hearing his breath come more rapidly than normal and feeling his stomach and throat cramp form the effort of holding back his tears. But after a few minutes, he calmed himself, and made himself sit back down and continue reading.

“At first, I remembered almost nothing of those first days and weeks without you. Nothing except the pain and emptiness, and Danny trying so hard to make me want to live. And then, I promised you I wouldn't die without telling your daddy about you. I think Danny sort of manipulated me into doing that to give me a purpose, some reason to go on living. But nothing could touch the despair. There were always people who kept me from going over the edge of the precipice, though, Danny, Jim, Molly and Monk. But none of them could touch the blackness. You were gone and I was left behind. I wouldn't die but I couldn't live. I was the living dead. The emptiness was transcendent, the one great constant in my chaotic life. 

“Then, one day, a man named Charlie Skinner walked into the bowling alley where I was drinking at 11 in the morning. Yes, William, I'm ashamed to say it, but your mother was pretty much of a drunk in those days. Charlie offered to give me a job. Not just any job, he wanted me to take over as Daddy’s EP. Charlie loved your daddy like a son, and somehow he knew that neither Daddy nor I would ever conquer our demons if we weren't together. 

“I moved to New York, and stopped drinking so much, and started dreaming about you again. One night, I dreamed that I'd held you alive, and it really scared me. It scared me so much that I called Daddy and he played music for me, like he used to do years before. After that, although I didn't tell him why, I called him when I woke up from a dream about you, and he helped me survive. I made friends with people, Sloan and Don and Maggie and Neal, and Charlie was always there, and as time went by, some of the blackness started to recede. But not enough. Never enough. And then, one day, one terrible, wonderful day that I thought was going to be the second worst day of my life, your daddy reached into the blackness, grabbed me up and pulled me out. He told me this ridiculous story about shredding paper, and then with his arms and his lips, he vanquished the darkness. A little later, I told him about you. And after that, I didn’t want to die anymore. I wanted to live.

“I dreamt about you last night.” Will stopped reading, surprised by Mac’s words. He didn't think Mac had had a nightmare in months. If she had, he'd managed to sleep through them. He read on. “You were running on a football pitch, fast and coordinated, athletic and blond, like Daddy. I watched your little knees, pumping up and down, below your shorts and above your socks and shin guards.” Will smiled sadly, thinking about the soccer game they had driven to Westchester to see two weeks before. Ned’s team of six-year-olds, running in circles with little idea what they were trying to do with the ball. Mac had loved every minute of it. 

“I realized something when I woke up from the dream. I can live without losing you again. I can be happy without forgetting you. William, I long to see you, talk to you, walk you to school. I long to know if you would prefer Batman to Spider-Man. If you would want to sleep in Captain America pajamas. My arms ache to hold you, to dry your tears and soothe your fears. I long to be short-tempered with you when you whine, and to have you get on my nerves asking “why” to everything. I long to see you smile, and to look into your blue eyes once again. I will always long for you. It is, as Daddy would say, simply a physical law of the universe. But I know now that I can long for you with only love, without despair. You will always be with me, every day, every moment. If you can hear me singing to your sister, know that I am singing to you. If you can see me laughing, know that I'm laughing with you. You are a part of me. You are a part of Daddy. When Charlotte is old enough, we will tell her about you, and you will be a part of her. We are a family of four.”

The letter ended with those words, and Will wondered if Mac had intended to write more or had simply found it unnecessary to add a closing salutation. He sat for a long time staring at the last sentence, first blurred with tears and then coming into focus as he absorbed the sense of confidence in the future that it embodied. 

A soft rustling sound came from the little cot. Will looked over to see his daughter’s hands, balled into tiny fists, begin to move. Then, the little rosebud mouth started to open and close. He began to rise, waiting for the wail that would surely come. His child. Mac’s child. Would the miracle ever lose its intensity, he wondered. They were a family. He had made a family. He was part of a family . . . a family of four.


	28. Epilogue One - A Family of Five

He'd just started making notes for an idea to develop for that evening’s broadcast when she entered his office so quietly that Will more felt the air current generated by the opening door than heard the sound. When he looked up, MacKenzie was standing just inside the door, contemplating him. She looks somber, he thought, and a flash of worry coursed through him that she had come to tell him that someone . . . one of her parents, Leona or Nancy . . . might be ill. But no, as he continued to study it, he realized that the expression on her face was more one of contemplation than distress. He relaxed.

“Madam President,” he said. No answer. The only movement was her mouth, as she began to chew lightly on her lower lip. “Mac? MacKenzie?” Will inclined his head in a questioning gesture, and saw a light come into her eyes and the corners of her mouth turn up ever so slightly. And he knew. He didn't know why he knew, but he was suddenly sure of the reason for this unexpected visit, sure of what she is going to say.

“Mac?” He could see her struggling and failing to suppress the beginning of a smile. Slowly, he too began to smile. “Kenz? . . . Are you?” 

The look in her eyes was all the confirmation he needed. He was out of his chair and around his desk, even before she gave the little nod of her head that accompanied the grin she was now powerless keep from claiming her face. He had his wife in his arms and was smothering her with kisses before she could speak.

“Oh, babe,” he crooned, rocking her slightly in his arms. “On, baby, baby . . . “

“Yes, it would seem so,” she said smiling coyly up at him, until he took her mouth again with his.

“Yes!” He fist-pumped when they came up again for air. He sounded, Mac thought, like the coach of a team whose swimmers had just clinched the championship. He stroked her hair and the side of her face. “I told you that there was nothing to worry about . . . that it was just taking a little time.” Her eyes filled with tears of joy. “Have you called Catherine? Daniel?

“No, I wanted to be sure first. I just took the last test a couple of minutes ago.”

“How many did you take?”

“Four,” Mac answered a little sheepishly. “Today, two yesterday and one the day before.” She shrugged under his withering stare.

He drew her in tighter, thinking of what she'd been going through. They hadn't been “trying” when they'd conceived Charlie two years before. This time, they had been, and each month that went by, although there’d been only four of them, Mac had become increasingly sure that Charlie had been a fluke, and that she would never get pregnant again. He'd watched the crushing disappointment that had lasted for days each time her period started, a scarlet rebuke and reminder of her biggest sin. 

“I'd like to catch that doctor . . . Sir What-the-Fuck, in a dark alley some night. Keep him from doing to anyone else what he did to you.” Mac smiled at this uncharacteristically violent threat from the least violent man she knew. Then, just as quickly, she had the thought that as a mere child, Will had been violent, resorted to violence, extreme violence, when he thought his mother’s life was in danger. Undoubtedly, he would do the same to protect her, or Charlotte or this new little life they’d just made.

For a few seconds, Will seethed with resentment at the thought of the British obstetrician who, to Will’s way of thinking, had been willing to destroy all hope in an obviously vulnerable and traumatized young woman, rather than concede that there might be some validity to the optimistic prognosis of a brash young doctor, American . . . and Jewish . . . had Mac mentioned Dan’s name . . . had anti-Semitism played a part, Will wondered, as he stroked Mac’s hair.

A couple of weeks before, late one night, Mac had started talking to him about her visit to this man who had delivered princes and peers. As she had talked about the grief and emptiness she had felt when he'd told her that with the complications from William’s birth, she was most likely now barren. Then, with the tears that had filled her eyes beginning to overflow their banks, she had described how standing on the street, trying to make her legs take her to the tube station, she had realized that she had been harboring the hope that somehow she would make it back to him, and he would hear and see how sorry she was about Brian, and they would have a life together and another child together. How it was the realization that this would never be . . . could never be . . . that had gutted her.

She had said that it was a “stupid, stupid dream” with such vehemence that Will wondered if she was even aware that it was their present reality she was dismissing as an impossible fantasy. As Mac described breaking down on the street, she was overcome with emotion. Her cries became great heaving sobs that cut off all possibility of speech, and finally turned to wails of keening grief. It was one of those times, usually reserved for Habib’s office, when she found that talking about an event that she thought she had processed, thought she had accepted, caused an intense and visceral reaction . . . pain or anger . . . that took her completely by surprise, and simply carried her away. 

At a total loss for anything constructive to do, Will had simply held her, and rocked her on their bed, while she screamed and shuddered with remembered anguish. He knew from his own therapy that there was no point in trying to rush things, or remind her that they were together and they did have another child. So, he closed his eyes and kissed and stroked her hair.

“Mummy? . . . Mummy? Mum . . . meee!!” Mac would never forget the sight of her toddler daughter, standing in their doorway in a Disney Princesses nightdress, wide-eyed with concern and rigid with fear. 

“Oh, God! Oh, Charlie!” Mac had exclaimed, furiously wiping at her eyes, and trying to reorient herself back into the present.

“Hey, there, Butterfly.” Amazingly, Will’d had the presence of mind to speak softly and soothingly. “Mummy’s okay. Really, she is.” He’d smiled, and saw that his voice was all it took for Charlie to be visibly reassured, at least to a significant degree, and returned to a world that was the predictable, secure place she believed it to be. It was still incredible to him that he could be this powerful and important to another human being. “Come on up here, Butterfly, and join us.”

The invitation into her parents’ bed produced an instant smile, as Charlotte Elizabeth Morgan McAvoy raced across the room and started pulling herself up by the twisted bedclothes that hung halfway to the floor. Will reached down without letting go of Mac and gathered his child into his arms beside his wife. 

Once settled, Charlie raised her tiny hand to stroke her mother’s still wet cheek. “Mummy, do you have a boo-boo? You hurt?” she asked. Her tiny eyebrows knit together in a way that always reminded Will of his mother-in-law.

Seeing that Mac was still trying to compose herself, Will answered. “No, Sweetie, Mummy’s fine. She's not hurt. She was just thinking about something that happened a long time ago, and it made her very sad, and she started crying.” Charlotte had studied him intently, the prodigious brain behind her blue eyes processing his explanation. 

Finally, she'd nodded sagely. “Mummy’s sad,” Charlie’d pronounced solemnly. With that, she wiggled out of Will’s lap, and kneeling beside her mother, wrapped both arms around Mac’s neck, and spread big, wet, smacking kisses on her cheek.

“I was sad.” Mac cleared her throat, and let her arms encircle her daughter’s sturdy little body. “But I can't be sad with my Butterfly here. I can only be happy when I'm around you.” Mac cleared her throat again and her voice sounded stronger. “You give the very best hugs and kisses. The very best big McAvoy hugs and kisses.” Mac felt Charlie relax against her, and then heard her daughter yawn. 

In reflex, Mac had yawned too, and then, Will, and then, Charlie yawned again. They’d all giggled.

“Let’s go to sleep. Here. Together,” Mac had suggested, looking to Will for his agreement to violate the “own beds” rule that had been instituted when Charlie had moved into a toddler bed, and was no longer dependent on her parents to leave her crib. 

A few hours later, Will had awakened to find himself clinging uncomfortably to the edge of “Mac’s side” of the bed, most of which seemed to be occupied by the smallest body there. He’d extricated his almost completely numb arm from under his sleeping wife and daughter, and stood up to stretch. The first tentative tendrils of dawn were beginning to streak the sky, and they provided sufficient light for him to study “his girls.” Mac lay curled on her side with her daughter’s upper body spooned against her. The child’s legs were sticking out at a right angle to her body and taking up most of Will’s side of the bed. When had she grown so big, he'd asked himself. It seemed like only yesterday when her whole body had fit in the crook of his arm. Mac’s cheek rested against the top of Charlotte's head, her chestnut hair commingling with the child’s blond locks. 

Although he’d hated breaking up such an angelic-looking pair, Will’d still had hopes of getting a couple of hours of restful sleep before the start of the “McAvoy morning madness,” as Mac had dubbed it. And so, he had gently lifted his daughter out of MacKenzie’s arms. He'd stood frozen for a moment to make sure that the child wouldn't awaken, and took his daughter to bed. 

Then, finding her awake upon his return, and deciding that sleep was over-rated, he'd taken his wife to paradise. 

Will wasn't sure how long they stood there entwined in his office while his thoughts had gone back to that night. “Hey,” he whispered softly against Mac’s forehead. “Do you remembered that night when you got so upset, and Charlie came in, and we all ended up sleeping in our bed?”

“Yes, definitely,” Mac replied in a tone that told him that it wasn't Charlie or her crying jag that she was remembering.

“It was about the right time . . . three and a half weeks ago . . . right?” He looked into her eyes. “Do you think that’s when . . . we made this baby?”

“It very well could have been.” Mac smiled. “And anyone who got his . . . or her . . . start that morning had quite a send off,” she added, leaning up to find his lips again.

They didn't hear the door open.

“Well, well, what have we here?” Leona Lansing’s voice filled the room, and caused Will and Mac to jump apart like guilty children. 

“Nothing. Really,” Mac responded reflexively, stepping away from her husband and absently smoothing her skirt. Will shrugged, making an attempt at nonchalance that failed badly.

“Yes. I can see that,” Lee said archly, looking from one to the other trying to read the strange expressions on their faces. “Anyway, I came down to give you a heads up.” 

Mac felt her gut tighten as she wondered what new idea of Pruitt's she was going to have to figure out a way to deflect. “What?” she asked with a sigh. The answer was the last thing she’d expected.

“I just breakfasted with four . . . shall we say, desperate . . . king-makers of the Republican Party. It would be an understatement to say that they are terrified. Jeb’s a total loss. Rubio’s crumbling. Cruz is a nut-case. Kasich is the best they’ve got, but he's not likely to overcome the celebrity factor.”

Will and Mac stood mute, staring at Lee, neither daring to let it sink in where this was heading.

“I can see by the deer-in-the-headlights expressions on both of your faces, you’ve figured out the punchline,” Lee said. When they didn't reply, she continued. “Seems like now that the barn’s on fire and the horses are stampeding, some of the powers that be are finally ready to listen to Taylor, and she's convinced them that there’s only one person . . . “ Leona paused briefly at Mac’s sharp intake of breath. “. . . with the chops to stop the Donald.” She turned her piercing gaze on Will.

“Mac’s pregnant.” He blurted out the fact, the only thought in a mind that had otherwise gone blank, as his wife turned to stare at him.

“Ah. So that's what that little celebration I walked in on was all about. Charlie told me you guys were trying for another baby.”

Still a bit discombobulated from the news that his name was seriously being bandied about as a potential presidential candidate, Will looked at her incredulously, thinking only of Charlie Skinner. “Wha . . . when? Like in a vision?”

Now it was Lee’s turn to look nonplussed. “What? No. Like at lunch yesterday. I always have lunch with my granddaughter on Wednesdays.” It was a tradition, now called Family Lunch Wednesdays, that had begun when Charlie Skinner had first come to ACN, and Leona had instituted a weekly lunch meeting with Charlie and Reese in the AWM dining room. To the outside world (and to Reese at the time) it has seemed like a business gathering, although the subject matter of their discussions was wide ranging, and frequently included Reese’s grades and social life. Now, Will, Mac and Reese had standing invitations, but given how busy they all were, all too frequently, it was only Little Charlie and Grandma Lee who got together on Wednesdays.

“You were discussing our sex life with my daughter?” Will asked incredulously.

Lee laughed. “Not in depth. She said she’d asked for a baby sister for her birthday, and Mac said ‘maybe’ and ‘we’ll see.’ No woman gives her child that answer unless she's stopped using birth control.” Leona beamed at them. “So, congratulations!”

“It's early yet, so . . .” Mac began, a note of caution in her voice.

“Yeah, yeah. I'll keep it under my hat,” Leona interrupted. “But you know, those guys I just met with will eat this up with a soup ladle when they find out. I mean this would just about cinch the election.” Now she looked at Will. “A toddler and an infant in the White House again, not to mention, you two. My God, it would be Camelot redux. Except,” she looked at Mac, “you’re probably a direct descendant of one of those guys who actually sat at the Round Table.” She laughed, a slightly ironic laugh. “Poor Hillary wouldn't know what hit her.”

As the reality sunk in that he had actually been the subject of a serious discussion in which he'd been suggested as a viable, potential presidential candidate, Will was again stunned into silence. Mac and Leona, however, started into a heated discussion of where Will could do the most good for the country, remaining at the ACN news desk or heading the Republican ticket. 

As he listened, Will moved from flattered, to slightly frightened, to sensible. “Mac’s pregnant,” he said again. Neither woman appeared to have heard him. “My wife's pregnant,” he repeated a bit louder, but still got no response. “That ends this conversation,” he tried. Neither woman stopped arguing. “Am I missing something?” Will asked, rhetorically. “Is there another way to say this?” he added, a question directed mostly to himself. 

Finally, he raised his voice to a level that could not be ignored. “Leona!” Both she and Mac stopped talking. “Leona,” Will repeated in a more civilized voice. “MacKenzie. Is. Pregnant. Even if I wanted to make this kind of a career change,” he paused and turned toward his wife, “and ask you to give up your career, because you certainly couldn't remain the president of a news network while I took up partisan politics, this isn't the time. You’re pregnant. That ends it for me.”

“Why?!” Mac whirled on him. Ah, Will thought, here she comes, Ms. Pregnancy Is Not a Disease. 

“I'm the father of this baby; right?”

“My God, Billy! Are you seriously asking me that question?” The hurt and indignation in her voice told him he'd greatly misjudged how emotional she was.

"Whoa, whoa. No. No, absolutely not.” Will put his hands on each of her shoulders and held MacKenzie at arms’ length, in the gesture he'd always used with her when he had an extremely important point to make. As it had the night of the bin Laden broadcast, and on a score of other occasions, it silenced her. 

“Let me start again.” Will took a deep breath while she studied him suspiciously. “Would you agree,” he began looking deep into her eyes, “that as the father of this baby, my job is to create a safe, nurturing environment that will maximize his or her growth into adulthood?”

Ye . . . yes,” Mac replied tentatively, as if looking for the trap.

“Well, it seems to me that for a start, that means not subjecting the body in which he or she is gestating to the incredible stresses and demands of a presidential campaign.” He saw in her eyes that he had her, so he didn't wait for a concession. “And,” he continued, “there is no way that I'm going to leave you alone . . . again. Christ! Kenz, I did that to you twice. I'm not . . .” His voice thickened with emotion.

“Will, I accept that the first time, you ignored . . . suspicions. I mean, everything was all fucked up. But the second time, there was absolutely no way you suspected anything when you went to jail.”

“Fair enough. That's not really the point. The point is . . . I'm not leaving you.” Mac blinked rapidly, and lowered her gaze, and chewed her bottom lip, as her emotions welled up. Damned pregnancy hormones, she thought.

Will moved his hands from her shoulders to the sides of her face, leaned in and placed a tender kiss on his wife’s forehead. Then, resting his own forehead against hers he said softly, “besides, you promised me that this time, I could watch you puke to my heart’s content.” He rubbed his thumb over her bottom lip, dislodging it from between her teeth. “Considering how content my heart is watching you do anything, that’s a lot of puking.”

Mac snickered. “Barfing. I believe I said ‘barf.’ ‘Puke’ is vulgar.” Will smiled and kissed her again.

Leona watched them, thinking how happy Charlie would be if he could see this. It was, she knew, the right decision . . . for now. But she couldn't help wondering whether on some January day in the future, she'd be standing on a platform at the Capital, freezing her ass off, watching Mac hold a Bible and Will stand with his right hand in the air.


	29. Epilogue Two - A Family of Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The McAvoy family is completed.

Uncharacteristically, for someone who prides herself on facing reality straight-on, MacKenzie wasn't about to give voice to her suspicions. Not even the silent voice inside her head. So, she put the nagging question out of her mind, at least as forcefully as she could manage. She'd really never been good at denial. Think about something else, she told herself. 

As the early Sunday morning light filtered into her bedroom, Mac lay in bed playing absently with four-month-old Duncan’s auburn curls, as he slumbered against her breast, his tiny milk-covered lips making a barely audible smacking sound next to the nipple that moments before, had slipped from his mouth. Mac inclined her head and kissed her infant son’s tiny forehead, thinking how much he looked like pictures she'd seen of her father as a baby. He was beautiful. He had been beautiful from the moment he'd emerged from her body, somehow skipping the blotchy red-faced newborn phase that most babies seemed to pass through. Duncan had seemed to come into this world smooth and serene from his first breath. At four months, his features were beginning the transition from infancy to babyhood, and he was rosy and chubby, and glowing with good health. And, appetite. Mac smiled and planted another kiss on the top of his tiny head. She’d already introduced a little cereal diluted with breast milk into his diet, almost three months earlier than she'd done with Charlie, and still MacKenzie felt like her breasts were stuck in overdrive trying to “keep the customer satisfied.” But, although she did her share of “kvetching,” as Riv would say, the truth was that Mac loved nursing. The quiet, the intimacy, the act of literally pouring life into another human being, one who was her creation . . . hers and Billy's . . . never failed to fill her with awe. It was like seeing the hand of God at work. 

If only her nipples weren't so sensitive and her breasts would stop hurting. They’d been aching a lot more this past week, she realized. Will’s caress the night before had made her practically jump out of her skin. The poor guy had looked stricken, as she'd babbled on to reassure him that he hadn't been too rough. She was just extremely sensitive. 

She was jolted out of her reverie by a wave of discomfort, much too strong to be ignored. Nausea. Yes, there was no mistaking the sensation. Four other times this week it had crept up on her during Dunk’s breakfast feeding. Taking Yoga breaths in through her mouth and out through her nose, Mac resolved to concentrate on something else, anything else except the building desire to extricate herself from her sleeping son and head for the bathroom. 

Mac listened for the sounds around the flat, hoping to distract herself. The family room television was playing a recording of Sesame Street, and announcing that today’s show was being brought to her by the numbers 6 and 8 and the letter C. Charlotte had left it on, forgotten, Mac realized, when she’d gone to the kitchen to be with Will. Mac could hear them talking, Charlie’s high pitched breathy voice, and her father’s deep baritone. They were making pancakes, a Sunday morning tradition that bordered on religious ritual in the McAvoy household. 

Will was such a good father. She'd always known he would be, known it since the time in DC, early in their relationship, when he'd nursed her through a nasty bout of flu that turned into pneumonia. But what set him apart in the fatherhood department was, as her mother had observed, the way that he did the little everyday things, silently plucking Dunk out of her arms when she was struggling to retrieve the door key from her purse, or getting Charlotte dressed in the morning, gently steering her into something appropriate for the weather and the day’s activities without stifling her personal style or considerable creativity. 

They’d gotten through an incredibly painful year in which Will had at last come to terms with his mother, not as sainted victim, but as the deeply flawed human being who had betrayed his trust. It had been difficult to watch the process by which he'd accepted her betrayal of the fundamental bond of parent and child . . . the duty to nurture and safeguard. It had been especially unbearable for Mac to witness his realization that much of his life . . . and especially the rejection that had led to her stabbing and William’s death . . . had been about keeping himself from experiencing his mother's failure to protect him from her husband's wrath. But in the end, it had made them a stronger family. That and the addition of Walter Duncan, not a junior but with his father’s initials, who’d been named, as they’d told Vanity Fair, for each of their “favorite newscasters,” Walter Cronkite, Will’s idol, and William Duncan McAvoy, the best in the business, according to ACN’s President.

It was the smell of pancakes that did her in. Usually, pancakes on the griddle in all of their buttery goodness was one of Mac’s favorite aromas, but today was anything but usual. One good strong whiff and her stomach turned over and bile rose into her throat. Quickly but carefully, Mac rose and positioned Dunk between two pillows, just in case this was the day he decided to roll over for the first time. She barely made it to the toilet bowl when her early morning nursing snack reappeared. 

Mac wasn't certain how long she had been alternately sitting on the floor next to the toilet or back up on her knees, heaving out what little was left in her stomach, when she heard Will’s voice, a modified stage whisper so as not to disturb the baby, asking if she wanted pancakes. Then, suddenly, he was in the bathroom doorway.

“Christ! Mac! Kenz, are you okay?” It was a silly question, he realized as soon as it was out of his mouth. Of course, she wasn't okay.

“Yes. Sort of.”

“Hold on. Let me turn off the griddle,” Will said and dashed from the room.

“What happened?” he asked when he returned a moment later.

“I don't know. I was lying in bed with Dunk, and the smell of the pancakes made me sick up.”

“Really?” Will frowned. “You used to love pancakes.”

“I'm sure I still do, Billy. It's just a fluke. I'm feeling better already.”

“Well enough to eat?” he asked.

The thought alone made Mac go white, and a second later, put her head back over the bowl.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Will said, sitting down beside his wife, and caressing away the strands of hair plastered to her sweaty face. “Hey, babe,” he crooned softly, holding her hair out of her face and off her neck, “what do you think this is? You were just lying there nursing when suddenly you became nauseous?”

“Well, it came on slowly,” Mac replied softly, when she could speak again. What should she say, Mac wondered. Should she tell him about the other mornings, or about the other ways her body seemed to be malfunctioning? Before she could decide, the sound of footsteps distracted her.

“What are you doing?” Charlotte asked, eyeing them suspiciously from the doorway. 

“Mummy’s not feeling well,” Will replied.

Charlotte frowned her best Countess of Ailesbury frown, and studied them closely. Will felt like a bug under a microscope. Mac turned away and succumbed to a bout of dry-heaves.

“Did you put another baby in Mummy’s tummy?” Charlotte asked in her most commanding voice, her eyes boring into Will, now a little less like his mother-in-law and more like a tiny copy of Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor. 

“No. No. I . . . ah, no, Butterfly. No, I'm . . . . No, I don't . . . .” Will’s voice trailed off as he looked at Mac, whose gaze didn't quite meet his eyes. “Mac?” he asked helplessly. When she didn't speak, Will turned back to his daughter. “Butterfly, will you do me a favor?”

Charlie nodded as she always did when her daddy asked that question. “Yes.”

“Fill up the water glass for Mummy.”

Charlotte pulled out the step stool that they kept in the master bath and climbed up to reach the sink and turn on the tap. Then she handed the glass to Mac, who rinsed out her mouth and swallowed a few tentative sips of the remaining water.

“I need to talk to Mummy for a little while,” Will said after Charlie had carefully replaced the glass in its stand. Three and a half was such an age of precision, Will mused. “So, will you watch Dunk? Just climb up on the bed quiet as a mouse and don't wake him. Goodnight Moon is on the nightstand on Mummy's side. You can read it to him very softly, okay?” Charlie loved “reading” her favorite books, all of which she'd long ago committed to memory.

“Okay. But it's not night. It's morning.” As Will was casting about for something to say in response to that, Charlie giggled and said, “but Dunk doesn't know that ‘cause he’s too little.”

“That's right,” Mac chimed in, smiling at her daughter. “And, we won't tell him. It’ll be our big girl secret.” 

Grinning from ear to ear, Charlie turned and left them alone, but not before firing off a departing salvo, “it better be a girl baby.”

“Mac, look at me,” Will said gently putting a finger under is wife’s chin and raising her head.

“Oh, Jesus, Billy,” Mac breathed as her eyes briefly met his before she collapsed against him.

“Talk to me, Kenz. What’s going on?”

She sighed. “For the last four . . . five, today . . . mornings, while I've been nursing Duncan, I've felt nauseous . . . “

“And, you’ve hid this from me?” Will sounded a little more outraged than he'd intended.

“I . . . it came and went . . . this is the first time I've lost my cookies.”

“Is it some kind of flu?”

She didn't answer the question, at least not directly. “There’s more,” she said, “my breasts . . . you may have noticed, they’re extra-sensitive.”

“Yeah,” Will agreed wholeheartedly, “that one is hard to miss.” Then, the full import of what she was saying hit him. “My God. MacKenzie, do you actually think . . . ?”

She interrupted him before he could get the words out. “I should have had a period . . . before now.” She looked away as she said it.

“Like a few days ago?” Mac’s periods hadn't returned to a normal schedule since the baby’s birth so Will had lost track.

“More like a couple of weeks ago.”

“What?” Will felt his jaw drop. Slowly, he closed and then opened his mouth. “Okay. Okay. Um. Ah. Well.”

“Oh, Billy,” Mac turned her face into his chest. “I don't know what to think. I've been trying not to think.”

Will paused to regroup, his thoughts spinning wildly. Then, the lawyer took over. First get the facts, a little voice said. “When we take the kids to the park today, we should go by the drugstore and get a test.” Will felt Mac nod. He took a deep breath, and spoke haltingly,. “Kenz. Sweetheart, even if you are pregnant . . . well . . . you . . . you don't have to . . . .”

“Have the baby?” she finished for him, already beginning to shake her head.

“Yes,” he replied in what he hoped was a calm and dispassionate voice. “I mean, it’s . . . it would be very close together. It would be a lot to handle, physically, mentally. If you don't think . . . .”

“No! No! I can't . . . I can't not know . . . .” She sat up, clearly agitated, and turned in his arms to face him. “If William hadn't . . . happened, maybe I could consider an abortion, but not now. I think about William everyday,” she continued, her voice and color rising. “Would his laugh be like Charlie's? Would he prefer white chocolate Easter bunnies like she does? Would he be tall and athletic like you?” She looked up at him and he saw tears glistening in her eyes. “I don't mind . . . really, I don't,” she continued, putting her hand on his cheek. “It’s right that he has a place in my life. It's just that I don't think I could stand wondering like that again . . . wondering about another . . . child of ours.”

The lawyer in Will wanted to remind her of the distinction she'd made frequently in discussions of Roe v. Wade, between the fully-formed, living infant she had held in her arms in Kabul and a microscopic ball of cellular material. However, some inner wisdom told him that the thing to do was to comfort her and let the subject drop. For now. Besides, the test might be negative, he told himself, and then there would be nothing further to discuss. He didn't expect that to be the case, and, more importantly, he could tell that Mac didn't either.

They sat in silence for a while, just holding each other. Will had felt Mac relax, but he was still surprised when he heard her chuckle. “Did you see Charlie’s face when she asked you if you’d put another baby in my tummy? That’s Tessa’s doing, you know. They had ‘the talk’ when we were in Surrey for Duncan’s baptism.” Mac shook her head, laughing. “I knew because Charlie found me straight away and announced that she knew how Duncan had started growing inside me.”

She'd also stunned her mother by asking, “did you have to marry Daddy?” A bit nonplussed, Mac had assumed that Charlie was thinking about the hasty city hall wedding that had taken the place of the grand church affair originally planned for June. So, Mac started explaining about how when Will had bravely elected to go to jail instead of give up his source, a story Charlie had heard many times, she had decided that it was more important to be his wife than to wait. Mac’s explanation had sort of petered out as Charlie’s expression had become increasingly confused. 

“No,” she'd said, her little face screwed up in consternation. “That’s not what I mean.” Then, she paused and said, “I was in your tummy when you got married, right?”

“Well . . . yes, you were, but . . . .”

“Tessa said that when men put babies inside women’s tummies, the women have to get married whether they want to or not,” Charlie blurted out. Mac stared in surprise at her daughter, as Charlie’s little brow knit up in concern.

“Oh. Charlotte, sweetheart,” Mac had breathed, the lightbulb finally going on. “Tessa told you that and now you’re worried that Daddy and I didn't want to get married. We only did it because of you.” Charlie nodded gravely, as Mac lifted her daughter onto her lap. “Think about what you know to be true. Do Daddy and I seem to be doing anything that we don't want to be doing?”

Charlie thought about this for a very long time, and then said, “no.”

“No. We’re not. We’re absolutely exactly where we want to be . . . with each other, and with you and Dunk.” Mac kissed her daughter again and hugged her closer. “We were so ready to get married and have babies. Why Daddy talked about it for months before we made you. You remember how he was when Duncan was still inside me, always fussing, telling me to sit down and not to lift anything?” Charlie nodded. “Well, he was even crazier when it was you in there because you were his first.” Charlie giggled at her mother calling her father crazy.

Then, turning solemn, she corrected her mother, saying, “no, William was first.”

Jesus, Mac thought, literal, thy name is a three-and a half-year-old. The country would be much better off if we had preschoolers fact-checking the current Administration. Rather than get into an explanation of what she meant, Mac simply said, “yes, that’s true.”

“So, was Tessa wrong?” Charlie asked after another minute or two of silence. “People don't have to get married just because they have babies in their tummies?”

Wow! Mac struggled for an age-appropriate answer for that one. “Partly right. Partly wrong,” she replied. “In the past, a lot of people thought that way, but that’s not so much the way people think now. Women have a lot more options,” she’d continued without thinking, and then prayed that Charlotte wouldn't ask her to name them. “Anyway,” Mac added hastily, “I imagine that Tess was repeating something she'd heard at school and not something that Uncle Jules or Aunt Shelia have ever said to her.” She'd kissed Charlie again, and judging that the conversation had wound down to a satisfactory conclusion, said, “Okay? Are we okay?”

“Okay,” Charlotte had repeated and then removed herself from Mac’s lap and run off in search of her cousins.

As Mac concluded her tale, Will was smiling broadly. With pride, Mac thought. His daughter’s precociousness delighted him, although he tried not to brag. After a moment, he asked, “Is is just me, or does Charlie sometimes get a look that’s exactly like her grandmother?”

“Which one?”

Will chuckled. “Yes, Leona's influence certainly’s not lost on her, but I was thinking of your mother.” Suddenly, all the good humor drained from his face, and was replaced by an expression of dread, as their likely predicament recaptured his attention. “Your mother,” he repeated slowly. “Oh, Lord,” he moaned, “your mother’s going to castrate me.”

“With a rusty knife,” his wife agreed, sighing softly in sympathy.

 

Will and Charlie went back to their pancake making, putting on a pot of oatmeal for MacKenzie, who soon joined them in the kitchen. She settled herself at the table holding Duncan, who sat Buddha-like on her lap, occasionally chewing on his fingers, and watching his sister and father pour maple syrup on their pancakes and chow down. Then, Will held his son while Mac ate, and Charlie ran off to get dressed for the park in the clothes that she and her father had laid out on her bed. 

Will carried Duncan around the kitchen, keeping up a running monologue about the various appliances and cooking tools. “So, this is a range. Some people call it a stove. Sometimes, Mummy calls it a cooker. Mummy has funny words for things. You’ll get used to it. It's because she’s British.” Mac shot him the fisheye, but Will refused to take the bait. “It makes fire and gets very hot,” he continued, “so you have to be very, very careful when you use it. I'll teach you to cook. In this house, the men do the cooking, although your sister is showing promise. Your mother, on the other hand . . . well, she’s brilliant . . . she's probably smarter than all of the rest of us. That's something else you’ll get used to. But, in the kitchen, not so much.” Will brought his lips down to Dunk’s ear and whispered, “I like to think of her as culinarily challenged.”

Mac rinsed her bowl and spoon and put them into the dishwasher. When she walked over to join them, Duncan immediately began making his “hungry sounds,” and stretching out his arms toward his mother. Taking him, Mac sat back down in her chair, unbuttoned her pajama top, casually bared a naked breast, and moved Dunk into position to latch on.

Will loved watching his wife nurse their children. He stood silently looking at them, and tried to ignore the import of the momentary wince that passed over his wife’s features when their son started to suckle. After a moment, Mac looked up at him and smiled. “See, Billy, he doesn't think I'm culinarily impaired . . . .”

“Challenged,” Will interrupted.

“Whatever. Our son thinks I'm culinarily delicious.”

Will chuckled and walked over to her chair. Bending down, he began nuzzling her neck, then licking, sucking and gently biting the place on her neck that harbored his very favorite freckle in the world. At first, Mac considered telling him to stop, giving in to a strange, prudish hesitancy to allow herself to become aroused while a baby sucked on her breast. But it all felt so good that she leaned her head back and gave herself up to the sensations. 

“Um,” Will whispered, breathing in her ear, “he certainly has a point there. You are most definitely good enough . . . .” He paused to suck on her earlobe and was rewarded with a small high pitched moan. “. . . to eat.”

“Anytime. Except here. And now.” Mac swallowed hard in an attempt to regain her composure before Charlie reappeared in the kitchen. Getting the message, Will straightened up, and ran his hand over her hair, bringing it to rest against her cheek.

“Whatever happens, Mac, we’ll get through it just fine.” The statement needed no preamble. She knew exactly to what he was referring.

She turned her head and planted a kiss in his palm. “I know. I couldn't . . . wouldn't be doing this with anyone except you.”

“We’re a team. We’re a good team,” Will agreed. “We’re really good at this.”

“Parenting?” Mac smiled so he'd know that she wasn't really questioning the assertion.

“Yes, but more than that, Kenz. We’re good at life.”

 

True to his word, Will steered his family by the local Duane Reade on the way home from Central Park. Mac bought a twin pack of pregnancy tests, ignoring the surprised expression on the face of the clerk as she took in both the nature of the purchase and the age of the baby staring impassively at her from the front-facing carrier strapped to Will’s chest.

Once home, Mac deposited the box of tests into a bathroom drawer and didn't mentioned them for the rest of the day. They fixed lunch, and the children napped, while Will and Mac read the Sunday Times and did a little work. Then, they travelled uptown for their regular twice a month Sunday dinner at Grandma Lee’s. There, they were joined by Reese and his heavily pregnant wife, who happened to be Will’s niece, Harriet. The conversation was dominated by the subjects of pregnancy, labor and infant care. Will felt like he had died and gone to Babyland or maybe Reproductiveland. Suffering a bit from baby overload, neither he nor Mac mentioned taking the pregnancy test that night. Instead, Will put Charlie to bed and Mac nursed Duncan back to sleep. Then, once Duncan was slipped onto his cot, they climbed silently into their own bed, and bodies entwined, fell into a deep and mercifully dreamless sleep.

By the time Will got home from taking Charlie to preschool the next morning, Mac had finished nursing Dunk, had finished “worshipping the great white porcelain god,” as her sister, Cat, was fond of describing it, and was in the shower. Listening to the water running, Will stood in the bedroom, looking down into the little cot his son was quickly outgrowing, and intently watching Duncan’s eyelids flutter and his little fists move up and down. What could someone so young have to dream about, Will wondered.

Before her shower, Dunk’s mother had stood in almost the exact same spot, watching him sleep, while gently tracing a finger from one tiny giraffe to another on his sleeper. Giraffes were his big sister’s current favorite animal and were featured prominently on her “gifts” to her baby brother. Unlike her husband, however, Mac’s mind had not been on their slumbering son. Rather, her thoughts had spiraled from contemplating her current condition to memories of the day she’d met the tall blond newscaster whose children were laying claim, if not waste, to her body with what seemed to be astonishing frequency.

This really was all her fault, she thought. She had been nursing so she thought she was safe even though Catherine had told her to be careful until she started back on the pill. But, she smiled in guilty enjoyment at the memory, Billy’d been so surprised and so easily seduced. The smile turned into a grin at the recollection of Will’s face when he’d realized that she was suggesting that they throw caution to the wind and make love right then, right there. What was it about him? Why couldn't she keep her hands off of Billy McAvoy? When had it started? That first day. Yes, as much as she'd tried to deny it, to stay loyal to the ideal of her devotion to Brian, she'd felt it the first time she'd put her hand in Will’s.

“There’s Will,” Kevin Marshall, her friend and contact, had said to her as they’d walked down the hall on the day she had interviewed at CNN for the job of EP on the political news show, “Washington Today.” “Will! Will. Wait up,” Kevin had called, “there’s someone here that you should meet.” The man up ahead of them stopped and turned around. Mac felt her breath escape from her body. He was taller, larger and more muscled than he appeared on the telly. And his eyes were ever so much deeper blue. “This is MacKenzie McHale, the EP finalist candidate from the BBC,” Kevin continued his introduction, as they walked closer.

Perhaps she'd been gaping at him, Mac wasn't certain, but she was sure that Will McAvoy was looking at her strangely, studying her in a way that made her want to turn tail and bolt for the door. Instead, as she’d been raised to do, she fell back on her manners. “I'm very pleased to meet you, Mr. McAvoy,” she'd said in what she hoped was a professional voice, extending her hand. “I've seen your work here and at ACN. I’d very much like to join your team.”

He shook her hand and then held it a few seconds longer than required for a business handshake. Mac felt like there was an electrical charge flowing from her hand to the pit of her stomach and then to . . . well, to below the pit of her stomach. She felt her temperature and heartbeat rise and prayed that she wasn't blushing. She fought to hold his gaze, being damned if she'd be the one to look away first.

Will continued to study her, cocking his head slightly to the right. “And,” he drawled in a far stronger Nebraska farm-boy accent than his usual on-air diction, “you’ve got a head full of ideas about how to make the show better, correct?” 

If he was being sarcastic, she didn't pick up on it. “Yes,” she’d said with an earnestness that Will found instantly endearing, “yes, I have a number of suggestions that I believe will improve both the quality and the . . . well, relatableness . . . if there is such a word . . . of the news and your message.”

“I have a message?” Will had asked.

“Oh, don't be silly. Of course you do. All great . . . all good . . . news presenters have a message.” No point in pumping up his ego too far by calling him great, although she believed he had the potential to be truly extraordinary.

Back then, Will wasn't the mega-star that he would become, but still, it had been a long time since someone had called him silly, at least to his face, anyway. Here was this beautiful woman . . . girl, really . . . not the least bit intimidated, and apparently ready to tell him how to improve his game. 

“Okay,” he said, “let's go to my office and you can tell me how to hone my message and get the audience to relate to it.”

She remembered every moment, every detail, of that first hour with Will. They’d discussed, disagreed, baited, and actually shouted at each other. His office had been much less grand and far more cluttered than she'd imagined it would be. So much of her life it seemed was destined to be spent in Will’s various offices. 

Well, she thought, looking down and giving Duncan’s cheek one last caress, time to get on with it and face the music. But, first, a shower. Half an hour later, Mac emerged from the bathroom, her damp hair in a towel, wearing the blue cashmere robe that always made Will want to run his hands over her body. Wordlessly, she crossed the room and handed him the small white plastic stick. Then, she curled up on the bed in a fetal position. 

Will stood for several minutes, rooted to the same place in the room, while he watched until the symbol appeared in the little window on the stick and told him what he already knew. Then he put it down on the bureau, walked to the bed and lay down, curling his body around his wife’s. 

“Did you look at it?” Mac murmured.

“Yeah. It’s positive, Kenz,” he replied flatly. 

She said nothing for a little while. Then, she asked haltingly, “you don't want the baby, Billy?”

“What? Want? No. Christ, Mac, I'd have a dozen children with you . . . you know that.”

“But you sound . . . .”

“I'm . . . I . . . I can't . . . I'm just scared.” 

More than scared. Mac could hear the note of terror in his voice. She recognized it, knew it from those moments when she let her own fantasies run paranoid, and imagined Millie appearing in her office doorway to tell her that Will had suddenly clutched his chest and fallen to the newsroom floor . . . like Charlie. But just as she knew that her husband was in excellent health, she knew that this pregnancy wasn't going to put her at death’s door, and she needed to find a way of reassuring him.

As if reading her mind, Will began to speak, “I need . . . we need . . . Charlotte, Duncan and I . . . we need you . . . not just alive, but strong and healthy.” He turned MacKenzie in his arms so that he could look into her eyes as he spoke. “Kenz . . . I need you to promise me something.” He paused, waiting for her usual retort that she couldn't very well promise something until she knew what he was asking. But this time, she remained silently studying his face, so he continued, “I need you to promise that if either Catherine or Dan raise any question . . . see any evidence that this pregnancy could be risky, or have long-term consequences . . . do permanent damage to your health . . . you’ll agree to end it.” He expected an argument. So much so that he almost didn't register her reply.

“I promise, Billy.”

“What? You do?” He looked endearingly confused by his easy victory.

She leaned up and gently kissed his lips. “Of course, I do. I'm not fanatical . . . I know where my priorities lie. Your welfare, and Charlie’s and Duncan’s are the most important things in my life.” She felt him relax against her. “We’re going to be fine. We’re all going to be fine,” she added, partly addressing the spec of life inside her. “You’ll see. It's just like you said yesterday, Billy, we’re really good at this making life business.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, everybody's arrived-more or less, and I've conformed my idea of the future McAvoy's to Sorkin's Season 3. I'll be doing shorter offshoot stories in the future and moving around in time. Thanks to all of the readers who have stuck with this story. It took me far longer than I'd anticipated to finish. I've really appreciated all of your comments, suggestions and encouragement. Stay tuned, I'll be back.


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